£ibrarp  of  the  theological  ^eminarp 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 

FROM  THE  LIBRARY  OF 
ROBERT  ELLIOTT  SPEER 

•3 


INSPIRATION 


INSPIRATION 

A  Study  of  Divine  Influence  and  f  - 
Authority  in  the  Holy  Scriptures 

J  ,  .  13  1959  * 

:  JfilCAL 

By  / 

NOLAN  R.  BEST 

Editor  of  The  Continent 


New  York  Chicago 

Fleming  H.  Revell  Company 

London  and  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  1923,  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  17  North  Wabash  Ave. 
London :  2 1  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh :  75  Princes  Street 


Dedicated 

With  Devoted  Filial  Affection 

to 

MRS.  CYRUS  H.  McCORMICK,  Senior . 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


f 

https://archive.org/details/inspirationstudyOObest 


Preface 


DISCUSSION  between  conservative  and 
progressive  theologians  reveals  one  dif¬ 
ference  in  viewpoint  which  accounts  for 
all  their  other  differences.  Briefly  it  may  be  said 
that  the  inspiration  of  the  Bible  is  the  single  central 
issue  on  which  they  are  at  odds.  But  even  that 
statement  of  it  would  exaggerate  the  breadth  of 
their  actual  dissension.  That  the  Bible  is  inspired 
by  divine  wisdom  for  the  religious  edification  of 
mankind  both  would  instantly  consent.  What  the 
effect  is  of  that  inspiration  on  the  quality  of  the 
Bible  is  the  much  narrower  question  on  which 
alone  evangelical  opinion  differs  radically.  If  at 
this  point  some  measure  of  common  understanding 
could  be  had  in  Protestant  churches,  unseemly  con¬ 
tention  would  almost  cease  to  mar  their  peace. 

The  heat  of  feeling  excited  by  controversy  over 
the  inspiration  of  the  Scriptures  is,  however,  not 
difficult  to  explain.  To  understand  it  one  needs 
but  to  bear  in  mind  how  fundamentally  Protestant 
Christianity  has  reposed  its  reliance  on  the  written 
word  of  God.  To  multitudes  of  the  devout  it  is 
literally  terrifying  to  hear  respecting  the  Bible  the 
least  suggestion  of  shifting  interpretation.  If  the 
Bible  is  not  a  “  constant  ”  in  the  problem  of  life, 
what  can  be  rested  on? 

The  question  is  a  natural  one  and  naturally  most 

7 


8 


PREFACE 


poignant  where  the  scholarly  studies  that  produce 
so  many  new  theories  concerning  the  Scriptures 
are  least  understood.  Criticism  which  in  the 
schools  seems  commonplace  and  incidental  is  likely 
to  appear  in  the  eyes  of  the  average  man  who  lives 
by  the  Bible  a  direct  assault  on  his  spiritual  se¬ 
curity.  Almost  invariably  he  attributes  to  it  a 
destructive  influence  which  those  with  whom  it 
originated  would  think  ludicrous.  None  the  less 
it  is  unchristianly  cruel  to  scorn  the  alarms  which 
such  persons  feel ;  rather  a  brotherly  consideration 
should  be  alert  to  assure  them  of  a  loyalty  as 
earnest  as  their  own  toward  Jesus  the  Christ. 

In  the  last  analysis  it  is  only  men  committed 
mind  and  soul  to  the  paramount  fact  that  “  the  Son 
of  Man  hath  authority  on  earth  to  forgive  sins,” 
who  are  competent  or  entitled  to  interpret  the  gos¬ 
pel  revelation  on  either  old  presumptions  or  new. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  gospel  revelation  can  never 
be  in  peril  of  being  distorted  by  true  and  passionate 
lovers  of  a  saving  Christ,  whether  their  premises  of 
interpretation  are  new  or  old.  On  this  spiritual 
certainty  may  all  Bible-lovers  rest.  There  is 
naught  to  fear  even  from  those  who  deal  in 
novelties  of  Bible  exegesis  as  long  as  in  their  lives 
may  be  discerned  the  “  fruits  of  the  Spirit.”  It 
is  the  highest  Name  which  underwrites  the  uni¬ 
versal  law  of  religion;  “A  good  tree  cannot  bring 
forth  evil  fruit.” 


New  York . 


N.  R.  B. 


Contents 


I. 

The  Voice  of  God  . 

.  ii 

II. 

The  Agency  of  the  Spirit 

.  18 

III. 

The  Materials  of  Revelation 

.  27 

IV. 

The  Providence  of  the  Canon 

.  35 

V. 

The  Compilation  of  the  Book 

.  42 

VI. 

The  Truth  of  the  Message 

.  50 

VII. 

The  Bible’s  Human  Element  . 

.  59 

VIII. 

The  Mirage  of  Inerrancy 

.  68 

IX. 

Education  and  Symbolism 

.  81 

X. 

The  Multiplexity  of  Doctrine 

.  96 

XI. 

The  Employment  of  Reason 

•  113 

XII. 

Miracles  in  the  Bible 

.  130 

XIII. 

Liberalism  Within  Orthodoxy 

.  145 

Appendix . 

.  !59 

9 


I 


THE  VOICE  OF  GOD 

AN  inquiry  into  the  nature  of  Biblical  in¬ 
spiration  can  be  of  interest  only  to  those 
whose  philosophy  of  things  human  and 
divine  does  not  exclude  the  conception  of  God 
communicating  His  thoughts  to  the  mind  of  man. 
A  thinker  who  has  convinced  himself  that  no  hu¬ 
man  intellect  could  receive  or  transmit  the  direct 
impressions  of  a  divine  Intelligence,  can  scarcely 
be  engaged  by  a  study  of  how  the  Bible  expresses 
the  mind  of  God.  His  only  answer  can  be  that  a 
book  humanly  produced  expresses  human  minds 
and  nothing  more. 

With  as  many,  however,  as  have  not  tied  up 
the  possibilities  of  the  universe  into  so  small  a 
parcel  of  their  own  opinion,  the  mere  supposition 
of  a  volume  conveying  to  mankind  a  message  of 
supernatural  origin  should  suffice  to  rouse  a  con¬ 
cern  to  know  its  credentials  and  appraise  the  ex¬ 
tent  of  divine  influence  exercised  through  it.  And 
the  more  profoundly  any  reader  is  persuaded  of 
the  reality  of  such  claims  for  the  Scriptures  of  the 
Old  and  New  Testament,  the  more  earnestly  eager 
should  he  be  to  value  precisely  the  worths  imparted 
to  these  writings  by  the  impress  of  divinity  upon 
them.  Assuredly  a  man  who  has  come  to  rever- 


ii 


12  THE  VOICE  OF  GOD 

ence  the  Bible  as  a — or  let  us  rather  say,  the — 
book  of  God,  will  be  equally  anxious  neither  by 
fanatic  superstition  to  load  it  with  significances 
that  God  never  intended,  nor  by  critical  skepticism 
to  rob  it  of  any  meaning  with  which  the  infinite 
Wisdom  purposed  to  invest  it. 

The  effort  here  begun  to  outline  such  an  ap¬ 
praisement  of  the  qualities  of  Holy  Scripture  pro¬ 
ceeds  then  on  the  frank  assumption  that  a  revela¬ 
tion  of  the  will  of  the  universal  Creator  to  His 
human  creatures  is  not  only  a  possibility  through 
the  medium  of  a  book  penned  wholly  by  human 
hands,  but  in  the  volume  of  the  Bible  has  become 
an  actuality.  The  assumption  is  of  course  a  pre¬ 
mise  of  faith  rather  than  a  conclusion  of  logic. 
Even  if  occasion  permitted  the  matter  to  be 
argued,  argument  would  never  demonstrate  it. 
The  ways  of  God  like  the  being  of  God  transcend 
syllogisms. 

Nevertheless  logic  need  take  no  offense  at  the 
premise  of  divine  revelation.  Many  considerations 
commend  the  idea  to  a  reasonable  philosophy — 
considerations  drawn  from  the  common  experi¬ 
ence  of  the  race  and  especially  from  the  historic  ex¬ 
perience  of  Christians.  Most  patent  of  the  facts 
that  sustain  it  is  the  Bible  itself.  Saying  this  is  not 
begging  the  question.  A  Bible  “  of  the  earth 
earthy  ”  would  indeed  be,  no  matter  what  its  own 
claims  in  its  own  behalf,  poor  testimony  to  the 
reality  of  truth’s  communication  from  heaven. 
But  the  Bible  that  we  have  has  long  since  im¬ 
pressed  the  world  with  a  character  to  which  it  is 


THE  VOICE  OP  GOD 


13 


far  from  absurd  to  attach  the  thesis  of  a  heavenly 
derivation. 

To  be  sure,  for  those  whose  inclinations  turn 
that  way  it  is  easy  to  single  out  from  the  Scrip¬ 
tures — especially  from  their  primitive  portions — 
illustrations  of  crudities  unmistakably  human,  for 
the  origin  of  which  no  half-way  candid  reader 
would  look  higher  than  a  this-world  plane.  But 
whoever  is  willing  to  do  the  Bible  the  justice  of 
judging  it  in  whole  and  not  in  part,  must  confess 
that  in  its  loftier  portions  it  soars  to  elevations  of 
sublimity  well  worthy  of  an  ultimate  authorship 
in  the  mind  of  God.  As  the  Westminster  Con¬ 
fession  of  Faith  says  so  finely,  it  is  “  the  heavenli- 
ness  of  the  matter  ”  which  the  Bible  contains  that 
justifies  regarding  it  as  a  heavenly  product. 

There  is,  of  course,  no  compulsion  on  any  man’s 
judgment  to  admit  this  divine  authorship  if  he 
chooses  to  deny  it.  It  is  open  to  him  to  maintain 
that  the  noblest  of  Bible  passages  reflect  nothing 
but  the  genius  of  men.  In  that  case,  however,  he 
will  be  constrained  to  speak  of  amazing  Bible  men 
whose  feet  have  “  climbed  the  steep  ascent  of 
heaven  ”  to  a  more  convincing  apprehension  of 
who  God  is  and  how  He  loves  than  the  greatest 
of  sages  elsewhere  have  attained.  But  one  who 
says  God  helped  them  to  the  truth,  has  no  need  to 
speak  of  a  remarkable  God.  If  God  indeed  had 
a  hand  in  the  making  of  the  Bible,  its  most  glit¬ 
tering  peaks  are  not  loftier  than  a  rational  expecta¬ 
tion  of  Omniscience,  looking  upward,  may  sur¬ 
vey  without  surprise. 


14 


THE  VOICE  OF  GOD 


The  awesome  drama  of  Job,  where  God  Him¬ 
self  appears  as  an  actor;  the  glorious  hymns  of 
faith  and  praise  which  the  psalmists  sang;  the 
thrilling  oratory  of  impassioned  prophets  denounc¬ 
ing  evil  with  voices  of  thunder  and  illuminating 
righteousness  with  the  lure  of  unquenchable  light; 
above  all  the  “  meek  and  lowly  ”  voice  of  Jesus 
Christ,  unfolding,  with  ineffable  gentleness  but  a 
strangely  commanding  power,  the  way  of  that 
mystic  life  which  eschews  self  and  inherits  eternal 
joy — these  things,  if  from  man  and  only  from 
man,  are  wonders  for  which  history  and  criticism 
have  yet  to  account.  But  if  one  says  they  are  from 
God,  all  is  accounted  for  the  instant  the  word  is 
spoken. 

But  the  greater — yes,  the  greatest — argument 
for  the  authentic  revealment  of  the  Creator 
among  and  to  His  creatures  is  afforded  not  by  a 
book  but  by  a  Life — a  Life  recorded  indeed  in  a 
book  but  so  vitally  distinct  from  all  that  is  written 
of  it  that  still  after  twice  a  thousand  years  it  con¬ 
tinues  to  dominate  the  mind  of  the  world  with  the 
independent  force  of  embodied  fact.  Nothing  was 
more  distinctively  characteristic  of  the  Son  of 
Man  than  His  consciousness  that  the  Father  who 
sent  Him  was  always  with  Him  and  through  Him 
was  manifest  to  the  men  who  were  His  own  daily 
companions.  Of  those  companions  it  was  later 
said  that  those  who  watched  them  “  took  knowl¬ 
edge  of  them  that  they  had  been  with  Jesus.” 
Even  so  mankind,  watching  the  figure  of  their 
great  Friend  and  heeding  His  words,  has  taken 


THE  VOICE  OP  GOD 


15 


knowledge  that  He  had  been — has  been — is — with 
God. 

Without  reference  to  theological  conceptions  of 
His  Personality,  it  is  impressively  obvious  that 
Jesus  Christ’s  mighty  and  constant  sense  of  God 
stands,  for  the  modern  man  as  for  the  original 
disciples,  as  the  best  of  all  pledges  that  the  Soul 
of  the  Infinite  does  seek  converse  with  the  finite 
souls  of  this  small  planet,  otherwise  isolate  in  the 
ocean  of  space.  In  so  far  as  Jesus  was  God,  He 
was  the  demonstration  that  God  craves  fellowship 
with  man.  In  so  far  as  He  was  man.  He  was  the 
demonstration  that  God  can  have  fellowship  with 
man  and  man  with  God.  In  either  aspect  the 
literal  feasibility  of  divine  revelation,  guiding  hu¬ 
man  thought,  directing  human  action,  is  sustained 
by  one  wholly  congruous  example.  And  plainly 
what  has  been  lived  and  felt  may  also  be  told  and 
written.  After  Jesus  a  Bible  is  no  longer  a 
miracle.  God  manifest  in  the  flesh  renders  God 
manifest  in  a  volume  of  writing  a  simple  and 
minor  sequence. 

With  full  confidence  therefore  in  the  rationality 
of  the  idea  of  “  Scripture  inspired  of  God,”  these 
studies  base  themselves  on  the  single  broad  belief 
that  the  Lord  of  heaven  and  earth  has  “  of  old 
time  spoken  unto  the  fathers  by  the  prophets  in 
divers  portions  and  in  divers  manners,”  and  of 
those  messages,  as  well  as  from  that  still  nobler 
message  “  spoken  unto  us  in  His  Son,”  has  pro¬ 
vided  an  authoritative  and  permanent  record  be¬ 
queathed  to  later  generations  that  “  through  com^ 


16 


THE  VOICE  OF  GOD 


fort  of  the  Scriptures  we  might  have  hope.”  This, 
as  already  said,  is  a  frankly  confessed  assumption 
— an  unproved  (but  fitly  believed)  postulate  from 
which  inquiry  sets  out;  for  no  inquiry  makes 
progress  except  it  has  first  determined  what  things 
it  will  leave  behind  unquestioned.  Whoever  there¬ 
fore  cannot  consent  that  so  much  shall  be  held  to 
be  fixed  and  free  of  doubt,  had  best  not  go  on  by 
this  road.  Let  him  turn  back  and  have  out  his 
own  wrestle  with  first  principles. 

But  grant  that  we  are  satisfied  to  accept  the 
presumption  of  an  actual  revelation  from  God  in 
a  book  certified  by  His  providence  and  divinely 
adapted  to  instruct  mankind  in  the  changeless 
things  of  His  purpose  and  will.  Then  we  are 
ready  to  advance  to  the  practical  examination  of 
that  book,  asking  what  are  the  seals  and  tokens 
of  this  august  authorship  which  it  has  pleased  the 
Lord  to  stamp  upon  it.  By  “  divers  manners,” 
says  the  apostle,  God  has  accomplished  this  trans¬ 
mission  of  His  thoughts  to  the  minds  of  men. 
What  more  fascinating  pursuit  can  a  studious 
brain  propose  to  itself  than  the  investigation  of 
the  particular  manners  which  God  has  chosen  to 
employ  in  making  the  Bible — discerning,  if  pos¬ 
sible,  by  what  standards  of  discrimination  He  has 
preferred  one  “  manner  ”  for  one  passage  and 
some  other  “  manner  ”  for  another  of  its  “  divers 
portions  ”  ? 

Before  entering,  however,  upon  the  highway  of 
this  attractive  study  it  is  necessary  to  post  at  the 
outset  one  warning  sign.  We  have  made  one  as- 


THE  VOICE  OF  GOD 


17 


sumption;  let  that  in  this  direction  be  our  end  of 
both  assuming  and  presuming.  Not  a  philosophic 
riddle  to  be  solved  by  hypotheses  and  presupposi¬ 
tions  lies  before  us,  but  a  tangible  phenomenon  of 
literature,  as  challenging  to  scientific  determina¬ 
tion  of  fact  as  the  firmament  of  sun  and  stars 
overhead.  Not  what  the  Bible  might  be,  nor  even 
what  (in  our  opinion)  it  ought  to  be,  is  the  object 
of  our  just  interest;  we  desire  to  know  simply 
and  only  what  the  Bible  is.  Too  long,  by  both 
those  who  would  magnify  and  those  who  would 
disparage  the  significance  of  inspiration,  has  te¬ 
dious  theorizing  been  indulged  over  what  God 
must  do  or  could  not  do  if  He  undertook  to  in¬ 
spire  a  book  of  permanent  religious  authority  for 
His  children  on  earth.  For  such  vain  disputation 
there  is  but  one  terminus,  and  that  is  the  common 
willingness  of  all  concerned  to  quiet  their  own 
clamour  and  look  in  the  Bible  to  see  what  in  fact 
God  has  done. 


II 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPIRIT 

N  inspired  Bible  must  depend  on  the  reality; 
of  personal  spiritual  contact  between  men 


X  JL  and  God,  But  so,  too,  according  to 
evangelical  faith,  does  the  daily  Christian  life  of 
the  simplest  of  private  disciples.  Each  means  ac¬ 
tual  divine-human  intercommunication.  If  God 
does  not  in  very  truth  impart  energy,  illumination, 
guidance,  to  individual  human  souls  in  this  world, 
then  indeed  we  have  no  book  of  divine  authority, 
but  by  the  same  token  there  are  no  lives  directed 
by  heavenly  impulse  to  the  service  of  Christ.  And 
it  can  only  be  by  the  same  Holy  Spirit  that  the 
divine  impacts  are  transmitted  which  accomplish 
both  these  purposes.  It  is  not  one  Spirit  who 
speaks  messages  for  prophets  to  repeat  to  vast 
national  multitudes  and  another  Spirit  who  speaks 
counsel  for  the  private  Christian  to  apply  to  his 
own  personal  perplexities.  It  is  in  each  case  the 
same  Voice.  But  is  it  the  same  sort  of  speech? 

“  There  are,”  says  Paul,  “  diversities  of  work¬ 
ings,  but  the  same  God  who  worketh  all  things  in 
all.”  How  wide  is  the  diversity  here?  When  God 
in  a  now  far  antiquity  inspired  twoscore  men  (or 
thereabouts)  to  write  what  He  has  since  collected 
into  the  canon  of  Holy  Scripture,  did  He  exert 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPIRIT 


19 


over  them  some  mystic  influence  brought  into  play 
upon  humanity  neither  before  nor  since?  Or  did 
He  but  enter  those  minds  by  the  same  silent  chan¬ 
nels  through  which  He  still  daily  responds  to  sup¬ 
pliants  for  the  wisdom  which,  James  declares,  He 
gives  with  limitless  liberality  to  all  men  who  care 
to  request  it?  Was  it  by  some  forcible  seizure  of 
their  mental  powers  that  these  authors  of  the  Bible 
writings  were  compelled  to  pen  what  God  desired  ? 
Or  were  the  promptings  which  guided  them  the 
same  character  of  unspoken  urge  within  the  soul 
by  which  devout  men  still  in  this  prosaic  day  are 
sure  that  the  heavenly  Father  affords  leading  in 
religious  duty?  What,  in  a  word,  is  the  essential 
quality  of  Bible  inspiration?  And  how  distinctive 
is  it,  as  compared  with  other  guiding  influences 
by  which  the  heavenly  Father  in  every  age  teaches 
each  child  of  His  the  path  of  His  pleasure? 

On  this  problem,  which  seems  so  central  to  the 
question  which  these  studies  have  undertaken  to 
pursue,  it  is  surprising  to  find  how  little  help  the 
Bible  itself  affords.  One  finds  that  the  writers  of 
Scripture  were  not  at  all  disposed  to  analyze  their 
own  psychology.  Perhaps  it  is  fair  to  say  that  the 
Hebrew  race,  to  which  they  belonged,  never  did 
develop  that  form  of  self-consciousness.  At  all 
events,  not  one  Bible  writer  furnishes  the  least  clue 
to  let  us  know  how  it  felt  to  be  writing  under 
God’s  inspiration  works  sacred  to  later  ages. 

A  few  are  rather  explicit  about  the  visions  and 
theophanies  whereby  matter  for  their  messages 
was  made  known  to  them — John  in  the  Revelation 


20 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPIRIT 


is  especially  notable  for  this- — but  not  even  these 
suggest  anything  other  than  the  normal  action  of 
the  human  mind  in  the  memory  which  retained 
these  communications  for  record  or  even  in  the 
habits  of  verbal  composition  which  gave  to  them 
literary  form.  The  prophets  who  begin  nearly 
every  paragraph  with  “Thus  saith  Jehovah”  but 
seldom  relate  by  what  means — sound  for  the  outer 
ear  or  impression  on  the  inward  thought — -they 
heard  Jehovah’s  sayings.  And  for  much  the 
greater  part  of  the  contents  of  the  Bible  it  may  be 
taken  as  certain  that  the  authors  came  by  the  facts 
and  thoughts  of  their  writings  in  a  manner  not 
consciously  different  from  the  production  of  any 
other  literature  of  similar  sincerity.  Scripture 
historians  questioned  eye-witnesses  or  consulted 
documents ;  poets  and  psalmists  wrote  as  the  surge 
of  life  experience  within  them  drove  them  to 
write ;  the  apostles  sent  letters  to  the  churches  for 
just  the  same  reason  that  men  write  letters  to¬ 
day — they  had  something  urgent  to  say  to  their 
friends. 

It  appears  accurate  to  add  that  no  author  rep¬ 
resented  in  the  Biblical  canon  had  any  conception, 
as  he  wrote,  that  he  was  contributing  to  a  book  of 
permanent  divine  revelation  for  all  mankind.  To 
that  thought  the  nearest  approach  must  have  been 
realized  by  Moses  and  those  who  worked  with 
him  or  after  him  on  the  “  book  of  the  law  ”  for 
the  Israelitish  nation.  They,  of  course,  had  no 
idea  of  reaching  beyond  the  circle  of  their  own 
people,  but  as  patriots  they  no  doubt  anticipated 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPIRIT 


21 


an  endless  national  force  for  the  statutes  they  were 
recording.  Is  it  cynical  to  observe  the  historic 
irony  of  the  fact  that  the  only  portion  of  the  Bible 
which  the  twentieth  century  finds  obsolete  is  the 
Levitical  code,  which  to  these  ancient  Hebrews 
seemed  perpetual? 

For  the  rest  of  the  Scriptures  it  seems  true  with¬ 
out  qualification  that  its  various  books  were  com¬ 
mitted  to  writing  under  as  immediate  an  urgency 
as  a  modern  preacher  preaches  a  sermon  or  a 
modem  compiler  might  undertake  to  preserve  the 
records  of  the  late  war.  Each  such  writing  was  in 
its  own  way  a  tract  for  the  times.  And  the 
Biblical  authors  were  preeminently  men  of  con¬ 
temporary  minds  intent  on  serving  their  own  re*- 
spective  generations. 

To  that  end  they  wrote,  as  the  case  might  de¬ 
mand  of  each  according  to  his  special  talent, 
memoirs  of  a  heroic  or  a  shameful  national  past 
to  inspire  or  restrain  the  people’s  current  tempers ; 
burning  exhortations  to  waken  conscience  for  liv¬ 
ing  sins  and  responsibility  for  living  duties ;  songs 
of  hope  in  dark  or  light  to  cheer  the  hearts  of 
spiritual  pilgrims;  dawn-bright  foretellings  of  sal¬ 
vation  and  refreshment  destined  in  God’s  mes¬ 
sianic  plans  yet  to  reward  the  discouraged  and 
weary;  loving  transcripts  of  those  words  which 
were  spoken  as  man  never  spake,  so  that  those 
who  never  saw  Jesus  none  the  less  might  remem¬ 
ber  Him;  and  simplest  of  all,  friendly  letters  hur¬ 
riedly  penned  to  carry  to  one  and  another  group 
of  beloved  fellow  Christians  such  quick  warning 


22  THE  AGENCY  OP  THE  SPIRIT 

and  instant  instruction  as  they  were  thought  to  be 
at  the  moment  in  need  of.  There  are  the  ma¬ 
terials — each  serving  the  passing  day  but  each  in¬ 
stinct  with  a  seed  of  perpetuity  that  their  original 
penmen  never  guessed — which  remain  to  consti¬ 
tute  the  invaluable  treasure  of  the  Holy  Bible. 

If  in  qualification  of  these  remarks  any  saying 
of  Scripture  could  be  cited,  it  would  no  doubt  be 
out  of  the  first  chapter  of  Peter’s  first  epistle, 
where,  having  voiced  the  early  Christian’s  pas¬ 
sionate  love  of  the  recently  ascended  Lord,  the 
apostle  harks  back  to  the  messianic  prophecies 
which  foretold  a  Saviour’s  coming: 

“  Concerning  which  salvation  the  prophets  sought 
and  searched  diligently,  who  prophesied  of  the  grace 
that  should  come  to  you,  searching  what  time  or  what 
manner  of  time  the  Spirit  of  Christ  which  was  in 
them  did  point  unto,  when  it  testified  beforehand  the 
sufferings  of  Christ  and  the  glories  that  should  fol¬ 
low  them.  To  whom  it  was  revealed  that  not  unto 
themselves  but  unto  you  did  they  minister  these 
things.” 

It  must  appear  plain,  however,  on  study  that 
these  words  do  not  contradict  but  confirm  the 
generalization  that  Bible  writers  wrote  for  their 
times  and  not  with  the  object  or  hope  of  helping 
to  create  a  perpetual  religious  literature.  The  al¬ 
lusion  of  Peter  does  not,  of  course,  extend  beyond 
those  passages  in  the  Old  Testament  that  foretell 
the  appearance  of  a  Messiah  among  the  Jews — 
passages  of  the  highest  significance  yet  small  in 
extent  as  compared  with  the  whole  bulk  of  that 


THE  AGENCY  OP  THE  SPIRIT 


23 


Testament.  Not  even  these  prophecies,  however, 
are  by  Peter’s  affirmation  classed  as  conscious  con¬ 
tributions  to  a  permanent  Bible. 

Indeed,  the  implication  is  quite  the  opposite. 
Peter  rather  signifies  that  the  Spirit  of  God 
prompted  the  prophets  to  speak  and  write,  for  the 
encouragement  of  their  own  contemporaries,  the 
blessed  message  which  promised  the  world  a 
Saviour,  but  to  their  disappointment  forbade  them 
to  anticipate  an  early  fulfillment  of  the  promise. 
They  had  thus  to  leave  to  the  future  what  they 
would  have  been  joyful  to  welcome  in  their  own 
day,  and  the  predictions  which  they  recorded  for 
their  own  neighbours  stood  to  be  the  comfort  also 
of  other  long  generations  intervening  before  the 
fullness  of  time  had  arrived.  The  prophets,  there¬ 
fore,  may  have  dreamed  of  their  prophecies  sur¬ 
viving  till  the  divine  One  did  appear,  but  that  does 
not  say  that  they  had  knowledge  or  even  intima¬ 
tion  of  a  destiny  that  was  to  make  their  writings 
imperishable  till  the  end  of  time. 

Yet,  if  totally  unaware  of  any  afflatus  that 
lifted  them  to  the  plane  of  timeless  oracles,  these 
Scriptural  authors  were  intensely  conscious,  as  al¬ 
most  every  page  of  their  manuscript  shows,  of 
that  other  fellowship  with  the  Spirit  of  God  which 
is  the  covenant  privilege  of  every  devout  soul. 
The  long  destiny  of  their  writings  they  had  no 
way  of  foreseeing,  but  they  fully  appreciated  the 
imminent  importance  of  making  a  mighty  mark 
for  God  in  the  generation  alive  at  the  hour  when 
each  man  wrote.  And  well  they  knew  that  such 


24 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPXBIT 


a  service  is  to  be  accomplished  by  no  merely  hu¬ 
man  cleverness  or  adroit  literary  device.  They 
hoped  to  speak  and  write  for  God  not  by  might 
nor  by  power  but  only  by  the  aid  and  guidance  of 
His  Spirit.  Just  as  a  true  minister  of  the  word 
of  God  in  this  day  makes  first  preparation  for  his 
sermon  by  prayer  and  meditative  invitation  of 
divine  influences,  so  the  prophets  of  old  com¬ 
muned  with  God  long  and  with  even  agonizing 
desire  before  they  dared  utter  in  His  name  their 
“  Thus  saith.” 

Of  course,  it  must  not  be  assumed  that  the 
modes  of  experience  by  which  Bible  writers  were 
admitted  to  participate  in  the  mind  of  God  were 
never  different  from  the  modes  of  experience 
which  are  common  to  men  of  to-day.  No  one  with 
any  due  conception  of  what  omnipotence  signifies 
would  dare  the  effrontery  of  setting  limits  to  the 
means  by  which  God  may  work  out  His  purposes. 
In  a  time  when  the  instrumentalities  through 
which  God  could  reveal  His  will  were  fewer,  and 
perhaps  the  spiritual  apprehension  of  the  race  cul¬ 
tivated  to  a  far  less  degree  of  sensitiveness  than 
now,  it  may  well  have  been  that  means  of  com¬ 
munication  more  objective  than  He  uses  to-day, 
were  necessary.  And  if  necessary  the  infinite  God 
would  not  be  hampered  in  His  resources. 

There  are  many  references  to  visions  and 
dreams,  in  the  older  Testament  especially,  to  which 
current  religious  experience  affords  no  parallel. 
But  lack  of  that  kind  of  verification  for  divine 
messages  now  is  no  disproof  of  the  reality  of  it 


THE  AGENCY  OF  THE  SPIRIT 


25 


then.  Nevertheless.,  even  in  the  prophetic  books 
the  impression  is  strong  that  the  men  who  spoke 
for  God  of  old  time  heard  the  word  of  their  proc¬ 
lamation  oftenest  in  the  prayerful  silence  of  their 
own  souls — just  where  the  evangelical  church  to¬ 
day  expects  its  preachers  to  receive  the  Spirit’s 
sanction  for  the  substance  of  their  preaching. 

It  is  noticeable  that  Paul  frankly  declared  that 
what  he  heard  when  caught  up  to  the  third  heaven 
was  not  usable  for  any  earthly  ministry.  What 
method  of  revelation  brought  him  (succeeding  his 
conversion  vision)  the  gospel  he  did  preach — 
which  he  always  insisted  was  transmitted  to  him 
without  human  intermediation — he  nowhere  has 
hinted.  But  those  delightfully  naive  passages  in 
the  seventh  chapter  of  First  Corinthians  (where 
the  apostle  acknowledges  that  he  has  “  no  com¬ 
mandment  of  the  Lord  ”  and  so  must  “  give  my 
judgment,”  in  which,  he  adds,  “  I  think  I  also 
have  the  Spirit  of  God”)  carry  the  very  ring  of 
voice  which  would  seem  natural  to  a  present-day 
evangelist — absolute  assurance  on  the  great  things 
of  God,  but  on  matters  of  minor  importance  a 
hope  rather  than  a  surety  of  keeping  in  line  with 
God’s  mind.  Is  it  presumptuous  then  to  imagine 
that  Paul’s  certainties  developed  from  experiences 
altogether  similar  to  those  through  which  many 
a  lesser  Christian  has  won  his.  way  to  great  tri¬ 
umphs  of  faith?  What  did  that  long  stay  in 
Arabia  signify?  Battles  no  doubt,  such  as  hosts 
of  souls  have  had  to  fight,  struggling  through 
floods  of  questionings  to  the  solid  rock  of  mighty 


26 


THE  AGENCY  OP  THE  SPIRIT 


affirmations,  of  which  his  epistles  have  become  a& 
undying  witness  to  edify  a  living  Church. 

There  seems  then  to  be  discoverable  no  defined 
line  of  difference  by  which  to  distinguish  the  oper¬ 
ation  of  the  Spirit  in  the  mind  and  soul  of  a  Bible- 
writer  from  the  same  Spirit’s  guidance  and  gov¬ 
erning  of  an  average  Christian’s  life  along  lines 
of  average  duty.  The  most  positive  conclusion  to 
record  on  the  subject  is  a  negative  one — there  is 
absolutely  no  faintest  shadow  in  Scripture  of  the 
widespread  pagan  notion  that  God  could  speak 
only  through  a  mind  robbed  of  normal  faculties. 
The  Bible  sets  utterly  no  store  on  the  mantic  rav¬ 
ings  out  of  which  the  Greeks  thought  they  could 
gather  divine  oracles. 

The  true  God  got  His  Bible  written,  as  He  gets 
all  His  other  works  in  the  world  done,  by  men 
using  for  Him  all  the  gifts  and  capacities  with 
which  He  endowed  them.  The  Holy  Spirit  has 
no  preference  for  low-grade  mental  tools.  It  is  a 
far  greater  thing  to  know  that  He  is  capable  of 
using  the  keenest  of  tools  appropriately  for  His 
several  intents.  If  by  no  external  test  is  it  possible 
to  say  how  the  inspiration  of  a  book  differs  from 
the  inspiration  of  a  life,  yet  the  fact  that  for  dif¬ 
ferent  purposes  the  Spirit  inspires  both  is  sufficient 
assurance  that  in  each  case  the  purpose  is  ade¬ 
quately  accomplished.  Each  case  is  the  deed  of  a 
perfect  Wisdom.  The  matter  rests  in  the  satisfy¬ 
ing  deduction  that  the  Bible  which  God  has  made 
is  every  whit  the  Bible  man  needs. 


Ill 

THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION 


NO  exact  distinction,  it  has  just  been  said, 
can  be  defined  by  the  human  observer 
between  the  movements  of  the  Holy 
Spirit  anciently  in  the  minds  of  Bible  authors  and 
the  movements  of  the  same  Spirit  to-day  in  the 
souls  of  common  Christians.  Yet  a  vast  differ¬ 
ence  in  effect  is  apparent.  No  Bible  is  developing 
in  the  twentieth  century.  Hosts  of  men,  the 
Church  believes,  continue  to  this  day  to  speak  and 
write  in  the  power  of  the  Spirit.  But  neither  from 
their  speech  nor  from  their  writing  does  there  any¬ 
where  arise  an  authority  comparable  for  a  mo¬ 
ment  to  the  sway — the  universal  sway,  we  may 
well  say — of  those  ancient  Scriptures  which  after 
the  lapse  of  millenniums  remain  dominant  over  the 
moral  world.  What  accounts  for  such  singular 
and  unfading  supremacy?  If  it  is  indeed  true 
that  no  external  phenomenon  of  authorship  dis¬ 
tinguishes  the  Bible  from  other  books,  how  does  it 
come  nevertheless  to  be  so  potently  different  ? 

A  process  of  selection  tacitly  attesting  the 
Bible’s  contents  is  evident  on  the  face  of  things. 
The  works  included  (unless  exactness  requires 
that  an  exception  be  made  for  the  two  books  by 
Luke,  the  Greek  physician)  are  wholly  the  product 

27 


I 


28  THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION 


of  a  single  race,  but  by  no  means  the  whole  litera¬ 
ture  of  that  race.  The  earliest  Biblical  records 
mention  other  Hebraic  writings  seemingly  in  their 
day  more  famous  and,  it  would  appear,  quite  as 
devoutly  religious,  which  despite  that  missed  the 
immortality  of  a  place  in  the  Scriptures.  The  re¬ 
pudiation  of  the  Old  Testament  apocrypha  by  the 
best  scholars  of  primitive  Christianity  excluded 
from  the  Bible  sphere  another  large  body  of  He¬ 
brew  thought  by  no  means  devoid  of  historical, 
intellectual  and  spiritual  merits.  As  for  psalms 
it  cannot  be  supposed  that  a  people  so  ready  in  the 
praises  of  God  sang  no  more  than  a  hundred  and 
fifty  of  these  hymns  of  the  soul  in  all  the  centuries 
of  their  national  life.  Solomon  alone  is  recorded 
to  have  written  more  songs  and  spoken  more  prov¬ 
erbs  than  the  whole  Bible  contains. 

The  books  of  Kings  and  Chronicles  confess 
themselves  abridgments  of  more  copious  histories 
extant  in  their  epoch.  Numerous  prophets  who 
appear  dimly  in  the  background  of  the  Old  Testa¬ 
ment  scene  must  in  many  cases  have  written  down 
for  their  contemporaries  the  truth  from  God  as 
they  heard  it,  but  failed  to  win  the  preservation 
of  their  words  to  later  generations.  On  the  other 
hand,  much  apocalyptic  literature,  such  as  in  a 
later  period  of  Jewish  history  became  the  favourite 
vehicle  of  “  popular  preaching/5  was  cherished 
and  handed  down  along  lines  of  pious  descent  for 
a  great  while  before  the  canon  of  our  existing 
Bible  was  closed,  yet  found  neither  part  nor  lot  in 
that  sublime  monument  of  the  Hebrew  mind. 


THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION  29 


The  same  sort  of  selective  sifting  is  further 
manifest  through  the  New  Testament  within  the 
scope  of  purely  Christian  literature.  The  intro¬ 
duction  to  Luke’s  Gospel  in  particular  illuminates 
this  fact.  The  “  beloved  physician  ”  who  came  to 
Jerusalem  with  Paul  and  chose  to  remain  in  Judea 
as  long  as  his  great  friend  was  imprisoned  there, 
was  impressed  not  with  the  scarcity  but  with  the 
multiplicity  of  written  memoirs  of  Jesus,  then  be¬ 
ing  handed  about  in  manuscript  among  Jewish 
Christians.  Not  a  few  but  “  many  ”  had  “  taken 
in  hand  ”  to  tell  that  wonderful  story  of  the  Son 
of  God  who  became  Son  of  Man.  And  there  is  no 
trace  of  conscious  superiority  over  that  multitude 
in  the  quiet  phrase,  “  It  seemed  good  to  me  also,” 
by  which  Luke  explained  his  resolve  to  include 
himself  in  the  loyal  and  reverent  group  of  such 
biographers. 

Could  the  evangelist  have  had — as  he  certainly 
did  not  have — a  miraculous  prevision  of  the  New 
Testament  now  possessed  by  the  Christian  Church, 
he  would  doubtless  have  been  amazed  to  behold 
but  four  gospels  surviving  to  subsequent  ages  of 
religion.  And  perhaps  he  would  have  been  still 
more  surprised  to  see  his  own  story  of  Jesus  sup¬ 
planting  all  but  two — more  likely,  all  but  one — 
of  the  numerous  manuscripts  in  circulation  when 
he  sat  down  to  write.  For  surely  in  Luke’s  modest 
commendation  of  his  work  to  Theophilus  there  is 
no  suggestion  of  a  conceit  proposing  to  do  better 
a  task  bungled  before,  but  only  of  a  humble  joy  in 
being  permitted  to  try  his  skill  also  at  a  task  rich  in 


30  THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION 


privilege  to  any  disciple  who  loved  the  memory 
of  the  gentle  Nazarene. 

Much  the  same  that  is  thus  said  of  Luke  might 
be  said  of  his  still  more  gifted  mentor,  instructor 
and  example,  the  mighty  Apostle  Paul.  For  Paul 
too  was  a  humble  man  and  must  have  had,  if  pos^ 
sible,  less  imagination  than  Luke  of  bequeathing 
anything  of  his  writing  to  be  a  standard  of  doc¬ 
trine  for  all  succeeding  Christendom.  As  has  been 
already  observed,  he  used  his  pen  not  for  obtain¬ 
ing  to  himself  the  dateless  fame  which  has  become 
his  meed  from  history,  but  for  the  intensely  prac¬ 
tical  and  right-at-hand  necessity  of  setting  his  fel¬ 
low  believers  right  where  they  had  missed  some 
of  the  meaning  of  Christianity. 

The  apostle,  of  course,  was  aware  that  the  pleas¬ 
ure  of  God  had  long  contemplated  a  supreme  book 
bestowed  on  men  for  their  religious  guidance.  He 
well  knew  that  book  as  it  existed  in  his  day  and 
revered  it  as  containing  “  sacred  writings  ”  able 
to  make  men  “  wise  unto  salvation.”  He  was 
happy  that  his  spiritual  son  Timothy  had  known 
those  writings  from  infancy;  doubtless  his  own 
knowledge  of  the  same  book  went  back  also  to 
young  childhood,  and  he  would  have  no  child  grow 
up  without  its  divine  counsel.  And  quite  possibly 
Paul  realized  that  for  all  God’s  purposes  the  Holy 
Scriptures  would  still  require  a  supplement — 
something  to  explain  better  how  the  salvation  fore¬ 
cast  in  the  law  and  the  prophets  of  the  old  Jewish 
Bible  was  now  to  be  realized  “  through  faith  which 
is  in  Christ  Jesus.” 


THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION  31 


But  that  thirteen  of  his  own  letters  would  go 
into  that  new  supplement  on  “  salvation,” — this, 
it  is  surely  safe  to  say,  absorbed  and  self-forgetful 
Paul  never  dreamed  of.  More  to  the  point  here, 
however — since  this  unanticipated  immortalization 
for  writers  of  Scripture  has  already  been  dwelt 
upon — is  the  probably  greater  puzzle  in  the  mind 
of  the  apostle  if  he  had  attempted  to  account  for 
the  fact  that  only  thirteen  were  used.  Why  these 
and  no  more?  Without  doubt  these  thirteen  con¬ 
stituted  but  a  portion — very  likely  a  minor  portion 
— of  the  correspondence  he  had  penned  through 
all  his  long  missionary  career,  with  “  anxiety  for 
all  the  churches  pressing  on  him  daily.” 

Paul  was  a  born  letter-writer  and  he  could  not 
long  have  worried  over  any  of  these  far-away 
circles  of  disciples  without  reaching  for  pen  and 
parchment  or  stylus  and  tablet.  No  doubt  he  dis¬ 
patched  to  distant  friends  many  an  epistle  which 
the  recipients  carelessly  failed  to  preserve.  In 
fact,  from  his  own  allusions  (1  Corinthians  5:9; 
2  Corinthians  2:  4)  we  know  the  apostle  sent  one, 
and  very  likely  two,  letters  to  the  church  of  Cor¬ 
inth  which  that  church  appears  not  to  have  prized 
enough  to  keep.  By  these  lost  epistles  may  be  il¬ 
lustrated  one  of  the  crucial  questions  involved  in 
this  inquiry. 

Considering  that  all  this  correspondence  with 
the  Corinthians  ran  in  a  single  connected  series, 
dealing  with  various  ramifications  of  one  problem, 
is  it  conceivable  that  Paul  could  have  written  the 
surviving  and  the  lost  epistles  under  a  differing 


32  THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION 


spell  of  divine  impulse?  If  Dr.  David  Smith’s  in¬ 
terpretation  is  correct,  it  is  the  second  and  the 
fourth  of  these  letters  which  stand  now  as  integral 
parts  of  God’s  authoritative  Bible,  acknowledged 
as  inspired  by  all  evangelical  scholars.  The  first 
and  the  third  are  those  which  have  disappeared. 
But  who  in  such  a  case  would  be  willing  to  say 
that  the  Spirit  who  watches  over  all  the  churches 
descended  to  the  apostle  with  a  divine  inspiration 
only  after  his  first  (now  lost)  epistle  to  the  Co¬ 
rinthians  was  penned  and  temporarily  withdrew 
once  more  after  the  second  (called  in  the  New 
Testament  the  First)  had  been  finished. 

An  apostle  with  the  problem  of  the  unruly  Co¬ 
rinthian  congregation  on  his  hands  was  in  no  situa¬ 
tion  to  be  content  with  intermittent  flashes  of  di¬ 
vine  illumination.  He  continually  needed  all  the 
godly  wisdom — all  the  protection  against  error  in 
judgment  or  instruction — which  the  divine  Spirit 
could  in  any  case  impart  to  an  earthly  servant  of 
God’s  truth.  It  certainly  could  not  have  been  more 
important  to  insure  right  regulation  and  true  or¬ 
thodoxy  for  an  American  church  in  the  twentieth 
century  through  the  medium  of  an  inspired  book 
than  it  was  to  get  a  straight  start  for  an  infant 
congregation  in  the  initial  age  of  Christianity 
through  the  oversight  and  agency  of  a  living 
apostle.  Can  it  be  too  bold  then  to  say  that  the 
Lord  did  not  give  the  Spirit  in  stinted  measure  to 
Paul  at  any  time,  whether  he  was  writing  to  the 
Corinthians  his  first,  second,  third  or  fourth  letter 
of  counsel — that  the  lost  writing  was  just  as  fully 


THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION  33 


inspired  as  that  which  we  read  in  this  day  when 
we  open  the  Bible  to  First  and  Second  Corin¬ 
thians  ? 

If  we  affirm,  however,  that  the  inspiration  of 
God  may  (or  even  must)  have  been  as  “  plenary  ” 
for  much  of  His  word  that  never  got  within  the 
covers  of  Holy  Scriptures  as  it  is  for  the  historic¬ 
ally  accepted  contents  of  that  volume,  let  us  make 
sure  that  we  are  grading  up  the  oral  and  transient 
utterances  of  God’s  messengers  and  not  grading 
down  the  values  of  the  permanent  record.  Not 
otherwise  will  we  be  in  harmony  with  the  experi¬ 
ence  of  prophets,  psalmists,  evangelists  and 
apostles.  For  to  none  of  these  great  heralds  of 
God  was  it  ever  a  commonplace  and  incidental 
matter  to  have  the  Spirit  with  them  for  any  of  the 
ministries  which  they  rendered  in  God’s  name. 
All  the  wonder  that  they  could  possibly  have  given 
to  the  thought  of  heavenly  Wisdom  permeating  a 
book  of  revelation  for  mankind  they  daily  felt  in 
themselves  as  they  realized  the  equal  miracle  of 
God  cooperating  with  them  in  their  work — em¬ 
ploying  them  in  His  work. 

This  exalted  estimation  of  a  divine  immanence 
in  common  life  which  we  modern  Christians  are 
apt  to  dismiss  as  unimportant — if  not  wholly 
mystical  and  theoretic — is  accounted  for  in  these 
ancients  by  the  much  higher  value  than  our  usual 
insight  supports  which  they  put  on  the  daily  busi¬ 
ness  of  serving  God.  That  was  to  them  colossal 
business,  and  required  all  the  power  possibly  to  be 
obtained  for  it  from  the  reservoir  of  Omnipo- 


34  THE  MATERIALS  OF  REVELATION 


tence.  So  men  still  should  think.  If  a  preacher 
really  understands  what  a  divine  duty  it  is  to 
preach  a  weekly  gospel  sermon  and  make  it  count 
for  men’s  salvation,  he  will  scarcely  believe  it  a 
greater — though  it  may  very  well  be  a  different — 
power  which  one  would  need  to  write  a  Bible. 

He  who  gives  over  therefore  the  attempt  to 
describe  and  distinguish  the  exact  potential  of  di¬ 
vine  dynamic  requisite  to  inspire  a  competent  book 
of  revelation,  is  in  no  wise  consenting  to  evaporate 
the  book’s  authority.  He  may  be  refusing  to 
measure  how  much  of  God  is  in  the  book,  for  he 
may  have  learned  by  exploration  of  the  greatness 
of  God  how  futile  (if  not  foolish)  it  is  for  the 
human  philosopher  to  mark  bounds  for  the  com¬ 
ing  and  going  of  the  Eternal  Spirit.  But  as  long 
as  one  says,  “  God  is  in  the  book,”  he  has  said 
what  is  all  sufficient,  for  he  has  said  that  enough 
of  God  is  there. 

Enough  of  God  is  there  to  insure  that  the  di¬ 
verse  contents  assembled  from  many  sources  to 
constitute  the  holy  volume  have  been  drawn  to¬ 
gether  by  the  magnetism  of  an  infallible  Intelli¬ 
gence.  It  is  not  an  aimless  or  formless  conglomer¬ 
ate.  Out  of  materials  vaster  than  could  possibly 
have  been  incorporated  into  any  single  Bible  for 
human  use,  God  in  His  own  time  by  His  own  se¬ 
lection  of  appropriate  elements  has  made  a  Bible 
as  it  has  pleased  Him.  Its  power  unimpaired 
through  the  rolling  centuries  is  the  adequate  dem¬ 
onstration  of  the  rightness  of  His  choice  and  the 
perfection  of  His  work. 


IV 


THE  PROVIDENCE  OF  THE  CANON 

IF  it  is  appreciated  that  in  the  very  times  when 
the  Holy  Scriptures  were  taking  form,  the 
inspiration  of  God  pervaded  utterances  and 
documents  far  more  numerous  than  a  volume  of. 
the  usable  size  of  the  Bible  could  preserve,  there 
is  introduced  into  the  study  of  inspiration  a  factor 
not  commonly  considered.  Superabundance  of 
materials  at  hand  for  any  kind  of  construction  al¬ 
ways  compels  selection.  This  is  as  true  in  the  mak¬ 
ing  of  a  book  as  in  the  building  of  a  house.  When 
therefore  God  was  compiling  a  book  for  men,  His 
first  necessity  (to  speak  after  a  human  manner) 
was  to  choose,  from  the  plentiful  mass  of  what 
He  had  taught  His  trusted  servants  to  think,  speak 
and  write,  such  portions  as  were  in  their  nature 
most  suitable  to  the  purposes  which  that  book  was 
to  fulfill. 

Contemplating  this  process  of  selection,  the 
reader  of  the  Bible  which  resulted  from  it  can 
scarcely  fail  to  feel  the  double  sanction  of  divine 
authority  conveyed  thereby.  On  this  view  the 
contents  found  within  the  volume  are  not  only 
what  God  originally  wrought  out  through  human 
minds  governed  by  His  Spirit  but  what  by  His 

35 


36  THE  PKOVIDENCE  OP  THE  CANON 


own  specific  choice  He  later  marked  as  ageless  in 
value  and  fit  therefore  to  constitute  the  permanent 
guide-book  of  mankind.  This  makes  the  Bible 
like  a  great  deed  of  trust,  which  on  its  face  con¬ 
veys  a  property  of  inestimable  worth  and  after¬ 
ward  is  indorsed  with  a  sworn  and  bonded  guar¬ 
antee  of  title  from  the  grantor  Himself. 

A  distinct  change  of  emphasis,  however,  must 
ensue  where  this  thought  of  a  Bible  compiled  out 
of  a  much  larger  inspired  literature  supplants  the 
perhaps  more  prevalent  thought  of  a  Bible  planned 
and  composed  as  a  unique  religious  unity  under 
influences  that  have  affected  no  other  writing  of 
men.  By  the  latter  conception  the  matter  to  be 
mainly  insisted  on  as  establishing  the  authority 
of  the  Scriptures  is  the  Lord’s  direct  appointment 
of  each  Biblical  author  to  pen  the  particular  por¬ 
tion  of  the  Bible  which  it  became  his  lot  to  com¬ 
pose.  With  this  goes  of  course  the  belief  that  in 
a  way  altogether  unparallelled  by  any  human  ex¬ 
perience  elsewhere  the  Holy  Spirit  presided  over 
the  mind  of  each  writer  until  he  had  finished  the 
stint  of  authorship  assigned  him. 

From  so  exclusive  a  stress,  however,  on  sixty- 
six  separate  miracles  of  supernatural  control 
wrought  for  the  production  of  the  Bible’s  sixty- 
six  documents,  there  often  results  a  strange  indif¬ 
ference  to  the  means  by  which  those  sixty-six 
documents  were  at  length  assembled  in  the  single 
book  which  to-day  standardizes  the  faith  and  the¬ 
ology  of  Christendom.  Men  who  are  vehement 
champions  of  the  plenary  inspiration  of  each  in- 


THE  PROVIDENCE  OF  THE  CANON  37 


dividual  segment  of  Scripture,  not  infrequently 
indulge  in  slighting  remarks  about  the  ecclesi¬ 
astical  powers  that  shaped  and  finally  closed  the 
Biblical  canon.  Sometimes  there  are  heard  al¬ 
most  sneering  references  to  the  few  votes,  one  way 
or  the  other,  by  which  it  is  supposed  in  the  councils 
of  the  ancient  Church  this  or  that  book  was  put 
into  or  shut  out  of  the  Bible.  The  impression  sug¬ 
gested  is  that  the  Spirit  took  the  divinest  pains  to 
procure  the  writing  of  the  various  fractions  of  the 
Bible  but  left  to  chance  their  preservation  and  the 
canonical  collection  of  them — that  the  parts  of 
Scripture  are  inspired  but  their  association  in  a 
single  volume  came  to  pass  by  some  guideless  ac¬ 
cident. 

All  this  appears  to  be  a  complete  inversion  of 
the  logical  values  of  the  case.  It  is  the  Bible  as  a 
whole,  as  an  intact  book  unified  by  its  one  ever 
controlling  interest  in  the  relations  of  God  and 
man,  which  bulks  on  the  sight  of  the  world  as  the 
most  potent  phenomenon  of  universal  literature. 
It  is  the  mass  impact  of  the  volume  which  makes 
humanity  bow  to  the  moral  authority  of  its  teach¬ 
ings.  It  is  not  by  its  fragments  but  in  its  integral 
wholeness  that  it  sways  the  mind  of  Christendom. 
The  concentration  of  the  Bible’s  sections  and  por¬ 
tions  into  a  single  harmonized  unit  of  power  is 
therefore  a  greater  work  than  the  first  production 
of  the  various  materials  thus  combined.  Is  it  pos¬ 
sible  then  that  the  Spirit  of  God  would  give  an 
omniscient  attention  to  what  was  less  and  leave  to 
neglect  what  was  more  ? 


38  THE  PROVIDENCE  OP  THE  CANON 


It  has  been  already  insisted  in  these  studies  that 
the  Spirit’s  agency  in  the  original  composition  of 
the  Scriptural  writings  was  actual  and  valid.  But 
there  is  no  inconsistency  with  that  faith  in  adding 
now  that  the  Spirit’s  agency  in  forming  the  canon 
— in  binding  up  the  completed  book  into  one 
volume — was  a  still  more  unqualified  intervention 
of  the  governing  purposes  of  God.  Moreover,  it 
was  an  act  of  much  more  immediate  consequence 
in  attesting  to  mankind  the  supernatural  reality  of 
Biblical  revelation. 

That  God’s  book  should  be  commended  to  the 
trust  and  faith  of  humanity  by  His  ratifying 
choice  of  the  matter  to  be  incorporated  therein,  is 
an  idea  much  easier  to  make  real  to  the  twentieth- 
century  mind  than  any  thought  of  a  Bible  writer’s 
intellect  being  preempted  by  a  temporary  divine 
Occupant.  This  is,  of  course,  but  little  reason  for 
maintaining  that  the  former  idea  is  truer  than  the 
latter.  But  it  is  good  reason  for  setting  the  former 
fact  to  the  forefront  when  one  is  inviting  the 
modern  man  to  put  confidence  in  the  Scriptures. 
And  it  also  affords  excellent  ground  for  thinking 
that  the  Father  in  heaven,  with  His  infallible 
foreknowledge  of  the  minds  He  had  given  to  men, 
would  Himself  exercise  His  most  anxious  care 
over  His  written  revelation  at  the  point  where  that 
care  would  be  most  evident  and  most  convincing 
in  the  light  of  common  earthly  experience. 

What  God  did  in  and  through  the  intellects  of 
the  Bible  authors — what  illumination  He  shed  on 
divine  secrets,  what  certainties  He  sent  to  replace 


THE  PROVIDENCE  OF  THE  CANON  39 


uncertainties — is  a  speculation  for  which  the  or¬ 
dinary  Christian’s  consciousness  of  God  may  give 
but  little  suggestion.  But  that  God  knows  how 
through  the  quiet  workings  of  years  on  years  to 
accomplish  in  the  end  the  “  bright  designs  ”  which 
Cowper  says  He  “  treasures  up  ”  for  the  good  of 
His  children,  is  an  observation  commonplace  to 
Christian  faith  throughout  the  world.  God  is  to¬ 
day  doing  just  that,  as  He  has  been  from  the  dawn 
of  history ;  thousands  of  those  who  love  and  trust 
Him  dare  even  now  to  testify  that  they  have  seen 
Him  working  so.  Wickednesses  accumulate; 
tumults  turn  the  world  upside  down ;  the  treacher¬ 
ous  and  evil  man  has  his  short  triumph  and  the 
righteous  suffers  unspeakable  affliction;  but  yet 
through  clouds  and  darkness  God  moves  on  to  His 
foreseen  goal,  and  at  length  the  thing  He  meant 
comes  to  pass  and  the  world  learns  that  its  Creator 
is  not  defeated  nor  His  good  intent  confounded. 

Let  us  say  then  that  the  making  of  a  Bible  for 
the  spiritual  guidance  of  man  is  just  another  such 
“  bright  design  ”  treasured  patiently  through  cen¬ 
turies  by  the  “  God  of  patience  ” — as  the  Bible  it¬ 
self  calls  Him.  How  instantly — and  how  appro¬ 
priately — the  whole  process  in  this  light  takes  its 
place  in  that  framework  of  providence  wherein  are 
comprehended  the  hopes  of  the  devout  for  all  good 
things  present  and  to  come.  God  watching  and 
waiting  through  the  centuries  to  accumulate  just 
the  words  of  direction  by  which  His  followers 
might  best  be  guided  to  peace  and  security  in  a 
troublous  world — what  in  all  that  is  more  mysteri- 


40  THE  PROVIDENCE  OF  THE  CANON 


ous  or  less  credible  than  God  planning  through 
centuries  to  establish  liberty,  disseminate  intelli¬ 
gence,  suppress  wrong  and  diffuse  human  good 
will?  And  where  thousands  and  thousands  from 
among  even  the  agnostic  and  materialistic  will  ac¬ 
knowledge  in  the  world  the  evidence  of  providen¬ 
tial  progress  toward  these  latter  aims,  how  shall  a 
Christian  doubt  the  hand  of  God  in  the  giving  of 
the  Bible  to  the  race  of  mankind?  Is  His  hand 
too  weak  or  His  patience  too  hasty  for  the  long 
enterprise  ? 

Suppose  it  is  indeed  true  that  the  decision  which 
included  one  writing  within  the  canon  or  excluded 
another  has  once  and  again  seemed  to  turn  on  the 
whim  of  prejudiced  scholars  or  the  accident  of  a 
scant  majority  in  some  convocation  of  ecclesiastics. 
Do  these  things  negative  God?  Is  it  not  through 
the  midst  of  far  more  precarious  human  con¬ 
tingencies  that  the  heavenly  Father  pursues  the 
path  of  His  secular  purposes?  And  does  He  not 
have  His  way  in  the  end  even  when  all  the  hosts 
of  evil  are  in  league  to  frustrate  His  intent?  In 
the  face  of  such  abundant  history  to  prove  how 
even  the  wrath  of  man  is  overruled  to  the  praise 
of  divine  power  in  other  things,  why  should  it  be 
hard  to  believe  that  in  this  matter  the  voice  of 
councils  and  the  judgment  of  church  fathers  have 
been  controlled  to  register  at  last  a  consensus  on 
the  contents  of  Scripture  wholly  agreeable  to  su¬ 
preme  Wisdom — accomplishing  thus  the  comple¬ 
tion  of  what  in  all  remaining  time  was  to  be  the 
“  book  of  books  ”  for  every  land  and  all  people? 


THE  PEOYIDEKCE  OF  THE  CANOH  41 


Providential  selection  of  its  component  parts  be¬ 
comes  then  the  great  final  seal  by  which  the 
Church  has  warrant  for  its  reliance  on  the  Bible. 
By  a  method  by  which  they  know  that  their  Guide 
is  still  working  in  the  affairs  of  this  world  the 
people  of  God  find  themselves  supplied  with  a 
mighty  and  satisfying  manual  of  divine  counsel. 
Its  broad  adequacy,  its  comprehensive  worth, 
tested  in  the  crucible  of  daily  life  to  which  it  is 
subjected  when  men  try  to  live  by  its  precepts, 
justify  the  omnipotent  toil  of  preparing  it. 

And  this  from  every  practical  standpoint  dem¬ 
onstrates  the  Bible’s  sufficient  perfection.  It 
meets  the  need  it  was  made  for.  Should  any  man 
complain  of  peculiarities  in  the  book’s  pages  which 
he  may  think  inconsistent  with  its  asserted  divin¬ 
ity,  the  perhaps  crass  but  perfectly  direct  answer 
is  that  anything  good  enough  for  God  should  be 
good  enough  for  him.  The  universe  is  full  of 
proof  that  its  Creator  rejoices  in  things  that  work. 
The  infinite  mechanisms  by  which  the  stars  are 
moved,  the  seasons  made  to  roll  round  in  due  suc¬ 
cession,  and  life  and  death  brought  into  the  har¬ 
mony  of  an  endless  rhythm,  get  their  ultimate 
approbation  all  from  this — they  do  what  they  are 
meant  to  do.  The  Bible  as  a  work  of  God  is  vin¬ 
dicated  by  the  same  law.  It  is  a  divine  book  be¬ 
cause  it  is  perfectly  effective  for  what  God  in¬ 
tended.  And  this  in  the  orbit  of  cosmic  efficiency 
comes  back  to  the  axiomatic  converse  of  that  state¬ 
ment — what  the  Bible  suffices  for  is  just  what  God 
intended. 


V 


THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK 

GOD  chose  the  materials  that  make  up  the 
Bible.  By  what  standards  of  judgment 
did  He  prefer  the  contents  thus  preserved 
above  the  mass  of  now  unknown  manuscript  which 
in  the  age-long  process  of  compilation  He  must 
have  discarded?  No  just  human  rating  of  the 
book  in  its  entirety  or  in  its  several  parts  is  pos¬ 
sible  without  some  appreciation  at  least  of  the 
viewpoint  from  which  God,  as  we  may  say,  edited 
it.  Definite  reasons  must  have  led  to  the  use  of 
each  particular  document  accepted;  it  is  impossi¬ 
ble  to  suppose  that  for  such  a  result  ancient  writ¬ 
ings  were  poured  at  random  into  a  collection  of 
unstudied  miscellany.  Is  it  possible  then  to  infer 
from  the  pages  of  Scripture  why  God  took  for 
His  perpetual  library  of  sacred  things  just  the  sub¬ 
ject  matter  which  to-day  is  found  in  it? 

This  at  all  events  may  be  stated  with  assur¬ 
ance — that  God’s  reasons  in  these  premises  must 
all  refer  to  the  objects  for  which  by  His  provi¬ 
dence  the  book  was  intended.  Among  these  ob¬ 
jects,  however,  one  minor  factor  may  be  supposed 
to  have  reacted  negatively  on  many  a  possible 
choice.  A  Bible  which  was  to  serve  as  a  religious 
handbook  for  the  general  host  of  men,  must  be 

42 


THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK  43 


saved  from  too  great  bulk.  Encyclopaedic  tomes 
are  studied  in  libraries  by  professional  scholars;  a 
book  for  everybody  to  read  at  home  must  be  a 
small  and  condensed  volume.  What  the  Bible 
might  have  been  in  size  is  suggested  by  the  later 
Jewish  Talmuds.  Produced  in  a  garrulous  age  of 
dogmatism  when  Hebrew  rabbis  talked  lifetimes 
away  in  vain  debate  over  paltry  casuistries,  the 
Talmuds  grew  to  ponderous  proportions,  over 
which  none  but  a  few  plodding  specialists  in  any 
generation  have  ever  achieved  even  a  half-under¬ 
standing  mastery. 

For  illumination  to  the  .common  people  all  this 
mammoth  Talmudic  literature  has  therefore 
amounted  to  nothing  from  its  beginning  until  now. 
An  unrestricted  Bible  would  have  come  to  the 
same  useless  fate.  A  Hand  to  prune  it,  to  cut 
away  thickets  of  words  that  would  have  darkened 
its  rich  fruits  from  the  sight  of  ordinary  men, 
was  necessary  in  order  to  bestow  on  the  modern 
world  a  book  which  a  child  may  handle  unbur¬ 
dened  and  which  every  believer  can  carry  whole 
to  his  secret  place  of  meditation  and  prayer. 
Many  instances  of  economical  restraint  may  be 
traced  in  the  order  of  the  universe;  the  compara¬ 
tive  brevity  of  the  Bible  is  one  instance  more. 

However,  the  Bible  is  what  it  is  by  God's  in¬ 
clusions,  not  by  His  exclusions.  The  vital  de¬ 
cisions  were  the  affirmative  choices,  of  course. 
And  naturally  the  first  question  to  be  settled  about 
a  Bible  writing — or  a  writing  appearing  available 
for  the  Bible — must  be  whether  it  conspires  with 


44  THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK 


the  book’s  first  purpose.  What  is  that  purpose? 
Venturing  to  think  God’s  thoughts  after  Him,  the 
Bible  is  intended  above  all  else  to  persuade  men 
that  they  can  have  and  ought  to  have  fellowship 
with  God.  No  composition  of  any  human  pen 
therefore  could  be  suitable  to  form  a  part  of  the 
divine  Scriptures  if  it  did  not  tend  to  this  funda¬ 
mental  conviction.  Whatever  author  gains  the 
honour  of  appearing  among  the  producers  of  the 
Bible  must,  like  all  others  who  please  God,  “  be¬ 
lieve  that  he  is  and  that  he  is  a  rewarder  of  them 
that  seek  after  him.”  It  must  moreover  be  a  be¬ 
lief  on  experience — experience  of  a  man’s  own, 
keen  enough  and  clear  enough  to  make  him  eager 
to  help  others  to  realize  the  same  practical  faith. 
Such  were  in  fact  the  building  stones  out  of  which 
inspiration  erected  the  imposing  and  time-defying 
structure  of  God’s  supreme  book. 

To  be  sure,  the  God-consciousness  of  some  of 
the  authors  whose  work  is  preserved  in  our  Bible 
does  not  seem  as  clear  and  spiritually  pure  as  this 
definition  would  appear  to  require.  The  writer  of 
Esther,  for  example,  was  a  person  so  little  accus¬ 
tomed  to  a  pious  expression  of  his  thoughts  that 
he  wrote  his  whole  story  without  even  the  mention 
of  God — a  circumstance  which  has  led  certain 
strict  conservative  scholars  to  question  whether  the 
production  ever  possessed  any  inspiration  at  all. 
Yet  a  study  of  its  atmosphere  rather  than  its  text 
exposes  qualities  in  the  rehearsal  of  Queen  Es¬ 
ther’s  heroism  which  leave  but  small  difficulty  in 
understanding  why  this  brief  history  was  chosen 


THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK  45 


by  the  Spirit  of  inspiration  to  be  bound  up  in  the 
Bible  volume.  Possibly,  indeed,  such  a  section  as 
this  was  brought  into  the  compass  of  Scripture 
with  a  sympathetic  thought  for  men  who  find  it 
hard  to  get  deeper  in  their  talk  than  a  few  oblique 
hints  at  the  religious  faith  which  they  carry  hidden 
in  their  hearts.  However  that  may  be,  though,  it 
is  at  least  evident  that  in  his  heart  of  hearts  the 
author  of  Esther  was  one  worshipping  the  God 
who,  as  Lowell  says,  stands  “  within  the  shadows 
keeping  watch  above  His  own.”  He  was  a  real, 
even  if  unconfessed,  man  of  faith. 

It  was,  then,  with  the  diffident  restraint  that 
usually  characterizes  men  of  his  temperament,  but 
with  a  faith  that  would  not  let  him  be  wholly 
silent,  that  this  now  nameless  historian  used  his 
pen  on  a  record  by  which  he  hoped  he  could  nerve 
men  and  women  to  depend  on  the  sureness  of  God 
even  in  the  darkest  of  adversities — and  live  up  to 
their  best  sense  of  duty  no  matter  what  dangers 
threatened.  He  had  too  a  clairvoyant  persuasion 
that  “  every  man’s  life  is  a  plan  of  God  ” — that 
nobody  is  born  into  the  world  “  whose  work  is  not 
born  with  him  ” — and  he  put  that  consecrating 
idea  into  words  that  youth  at  least  will  not  forget: 
“  Who  knoweth  whether  thou  art  not  come  to  the 
kingdom  for  such  a  time  as  this?”  Should  not 
then  the  everyday  modern  Christian,  to  whom  such 
clear  confidence  in  the  providential  ordering  of 
man’s  life  is  vastly  rich  in  both  comfort  and  stim¬ 
ulus,  give  thanks  that  the  Spirit  of  God  never  es¬ 
tablished  any  arbitrary  rule  requiring  God’s  name 


46  THE  COMPILATION  OE  THE  BOOK 


to  appear  in  each  separate  contribution  to  Scrip¬ 
ture.  That  would  have  left  out  Esther  entirely. 
What  is  requisite  everywhere  is  a  message  that 
points  and  leads  to  God.  And  that  Esther  surely 
has  despite  its  secular-sounding  text. 

More  dubious  under  this  criterion  is  the  right 
of  the  Song  of  Solomon  to  be  reckoned  among  the 
sacred  writings  of  true  religion.  It  does  contain 
once  the  divine  Name.  But  there  is  in  it  far  less 
consciousness  of  living  and  moving  beneath  the 
eye  of  God  than  in  the  heroic  romance  of  the 
Persian  queen.  Besides,  the  “  song  ”  (which  is 
really  a  drama)  has  suffered  in  repute  from  the 
meddling  of  doctrinaires  who  have  foolishly  tried 
to  save  it  as  canonical  by  pretending  that  it  is 
something  which  it  never  was  or  could  be.  Not 
content  to  let  its  literary  character  stand  as  the 
Holy  Spirit  left  it,  these  meddlers  have  tried  to 
veneer  the  drama  with  a  fictitious  interpretation 
expected  to  make  it  look  religious.  By  fantastic 
allegorizing  they  would  exhibit  it  as  a  picture  of 
the  love  of  Christ  and  His  Church — a  violent 
manipulation  without  a  shred  of  reason  in  the 
poem  itself  but  alleged  to  be  necessary  in  order  to 
make  its  tone  sanctimonious  enough  to  accord  with 
an  inspired  Bible.  As  if  men  better  than  the  Spirit 
know  what  does  accord  with  an  inspired  Bible! 

From  such  means  of  commending  it  to  the  re¬ 
spect  of  the  Bible’s  friends,  the  Song  of  Solomon 
has  in  truth  suffered  ten  times  more  than  it 
profited.  Many  readers  have  instinctively  as¬ 
sumed  that  a  piece  of  literature  which,  as  it 


THE  COMPILATION  OP  THE  BOOK  47 


seemed,  could  not  be  vindicated  for  religious  use 
except  by  distortions  obnoxious  to  common  sense, 
must  be  of  small  consequence,  if  not  quite  out  of 
place,  in  a  book  drawing  its  credentials  from  God. 
But  their  verdict  might  have  been  very  different 
if  reason  for  its  appearing  within  the  canon  had 
been  sought  in  its  own  inherent  character  rather 
than  in  an  artificial  halo  invented  to  sanctify  it. 

Really  responsible  scholarship  reports  instead 
that  the  Song  of  Solomon  is  in  fact  a  delicately 
wrought  idyll  glorifying  stainless  fidelity  in  ro¬ 
mantic  love  between  woman  and  man.  Under  an 
oriental  exuberance  of  imagery  obscure  to  western 
understanding,  patient  study  traces  the  story  of  a 
country  maiden  stolen  from  her  shepherd  swain 
and  carried  away  to  the  king’s  harem,  where  in 
the  simplicity  of  a  pure  and  steadfast  heart  she 
repulses  royal  blandishments  until  in  sheer  honour 
to  her  loyalty  the  king  restores  her  to  her  rustic 
lover,  from  whom  the  allegiance  of  her  heart  had 
never  a  moment  wavered.  If  only  the  people  of 
God  had  kept  a  just  sense  of  the  sacredness  with 
which  the  Creator  invested  the  sex  facts  of  life 
when  “  male  and  female  created  he  them,”  it  is 
scarcely  possible  that  surprise  would  greet  the  sug¬ 
gestion  that  a  love  drama — a  drama  of  true  love 
— held  a  central  place  in  the  written  word  of  God. 

It  is  humanity’s  jesting  or  sensual  degradations 
of  love  which  make  such  a  theme  seem  strange  in 
such  a  book.  In  an  elder  age  and  an  eastern  life, 
where  the  sense  of  the  story  would  be  more  in¬ 
telligible  to  the  common  mind,  the  poem  may 


48  THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK 


doubtless  have  helped  many  a  soul  to  know  the 
holiness  in  God’s  sight  of  love  and  marriage.  And 
that  assuredly  would  be  leading  a  man  closer  to 
the  divine.  Let  us  not  then  disavow  even  this 
strangely  mystic  “  song  ”  as  unworthy  of  the 
Bible.  Possibly  the  day  may  come  when  its  re¬ 
covered  meaning  will  again  shed  a  hallowed  light 
on  the  unity  of  those  “  whom  God  hath  joined  to¬ 
gether.” 

It  is  impossible,  however,  to  prolong  in  detail 
the  inquiry  how  each  particular  element  in  this 
composite  Bible  helps  on  the  single  coordinate  aim 
of  pointing  men  to  God.  The  fact  which  the  il¬ 
lustrations  just  discussed  tend  to  show  might  be 
fortified  by  consecutive  citations  from  every  one 
of  the  Bible’s  sixty-six  divisions — there  is  but  one 
aim  in  the  book  but  that  aim  is  fulfilled  in  a  variety 
of  modes  too  manifold  to  count.  The  Bible  has 
consistency  without  sameness. 

Men  are  best  won  to  confidence  in  God  by 
knowledge  of  what  He  has  been  to  generations 
past  who  served  Him.  The  Bible  meets  that  with 
its  abundant  histories,  culminating  in  the  history 
of  Him  in  whom  “  dwelleth  all  the  fullness  of  the 
Godhead  bodily.”  Men  learn  to  praise  God  by 
examples  of  praise;  how  rich  the  Bible  is  in  that 
incentive.  They  are  taught  to  think  right  about 
God  as  they  share  the  thoughts  of  the  right  think¬ 
ers  of  the  past ;  the  Bible  is  the  ultimate  school  for 
that  crowning  art  of  the  human  mind.  And  there 
are  portions  besides  to  glorify  simple  common 
sense. 


THE  COMPILATION  OF  THE  BOOK  49 


So  it  becomes  apparent  that  another  of  God’s 
guiding  principles  for  selection  of  the  Scriptures 
is  the  need  of  wide  variety.  Variety  is  demanded 
by  men’s  different  moods  and  circumstances ;  there 
must  be  much  for  the  man  in  joy,  but  that  neces¬ 
sity  cannot  be  permitted  to  skimp  the  comfort  pro¬ 
vided  for  the  man  in  grief.  A  provision  for  the 
satisfaction  of  a  man’s  reason  as  he  questions  the 
ways  of  God  is  indispensable.  But  it  would  be  a 
sadly  inadequate  Bible  which  spoke  only  to  reason 
and  had  no  voice  of  appeal  to  a  man’s  emotions 
and  no  challenge  for  his  will.  Optimism  and  ap¬ 
prehension,  daring  and  caution,  conservatism  and 
progressiveness — all  these  must  be  balanced 
against  one  another  if  the  moral  movement  of 
mankind  is  kept  in  equilibrium.  And  true  to  every 
need  the  Bible  supplies  all  these  elements  in  an 
absolute  wealth  of  variousness.  May  God  be 
praised  again  for  His  “  divers  manners.’* 


VI 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

SURER  than  all  else  in  the  Christian’s  con¬ 
viction  concerning  the  Bible  is  his  faith 
that  the  Bible  is  true.  An  undeniable  spir¬ 
itual  instinct  would  demand  that,  even  if  the  in¬ 
ferences  of  reason  did  not.  It  is  the  same  instinct 
which  breaks  to  the  surface  so  emphatically  in 
Paul’s  abrupt  exclamation:  “Yea,  let  God  be 
found  true  and  every  man  a  liar.”  Whoever  or 
whatever  else  is  false  in  the  universe,  God  must 
not  be ;  the  universe  dissolves  at  the  very  imagina¬ 
tion  of  a  truthless  Creator.  And  by  necessity  if 
the  God  of  truth  prepares  for  mankind  a  book  re¬ 
vealing  His  ways  and  will,  that  too  must  be  a 
book  of  truth. 

The  very  soundness  of  this  confidence  in  Scrip¬ 
ture  truth  may,  however,  betray  the  unconsidering 
and  superficial  to  unwarranted  conclusions.  So- 
called  plain  thinking  on  supposedly  obvious  topics 
often  speeds  too  fast  to  fixed  opinions.  Truth 
seems  an  idea  of  such  clarity  that  few  perhaps 
think  of  its  requiring  analysis  in  order  to  discrim¬ 
inate  between  characters  and  forms  of  truth.  In 
the  story  of  world  events  offered  by  the  daily  pa¬ 
per  there  is  commonly  no  question  involved  but 

5o 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


51 


the  simple  test:  Did  what  is  told  here  happen  as 
it  is  here  related  or  did  it  not?  Even  in  the  cur¬ 
rent  press,  however,  when  editor  or  correspondent 
assumes  to  estimate  the  motives  and  delineate  the 
influence  of  a  statesman,  a  party  or  a  movement, 
the  fidelity  of  the  report  depends  on  something 
deeper  than  the  literal  precision  of  the  facts  as¬ 
serted.  The  facts  may  all  be  actual  and  yet  the 
interpretation  of  them  totally  astray;  either  be¬ 
cause  all  the  elements  of  the  case  have  not  been 
brought  into  view  or  because  the  commentator  is 
deficient  in  understanding  of  what  he  does  see. 

In  a  still  deeper  stratum  of  thought,  where  men 
deal  with  the  philosophy  of  life,  mere  accuracy  of 
statement  is  less  sufficient  to  convey  truth.  False 
teachers  in  economics,  sociology  or  religion  are  but 
seldom  liars;  in  the  average  case  they  tell  facts 
quite  indisputably.  But  they  tell  the  facts  in 
wrong  relations,  and  expose  their  inherent  falsity 
when  facts  which  do  not  suit  their  theories  they 
willfully  pass  by.  In  all  the  greater  interests  of 
human  life  it  takes  something  better  than  a  correct 
reporter  to  speak  the  truth;  only  a  man  having 
(according  to  Bible  language)  “  truth  in  the  in¬ 
ward  parts  ” — a  man  saturated  with  love  of  truth¬ 
fulness — is  capable  of  marshalling  into  his  view 
and  into  the  view  of  other  men  that  wholeness  of 
reality  which  alone  is  worthy  to  be  called  in  any 
large  sense  the  truth. 

If  thus  difficult  and  unusual  is  the  comprehen¬ 
sion  of  the  whole  truth  in  the  graver  of  humanity's 
own  concerns,  how  much  more  difficult  must  it  be 


52 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


to  attain  a  truthful  grasp  of  the  far  profounder 
things  that  have  to  do  with  the  mutual  concerns 
of  man  and  God.  Whether  it  is  man’s  responsi¬ 
bility  as  a  self-willing  moral  creature  or  his  di¬ 
vinely  surprising  opportunity  to  help  God  realize 
the  immortal  ideals  to  which  creation  is  dedicated 
— whatever  the  message,  warning  or  summoning, 
which  the  word  from  heaven  is  designed  to  convey 
— this  at  least  is  sure  in  any  case,  that  expression 
of  the  thought  will  overtax  the  capacity  of  the 
brain  and  soul  chosen  to  be  the  channel  of  it. 
Nevertheless  it  is  such  supernal  ideas  as  these  that 
the  Bible  does  express.  From  this  viewpoint  the 
making  of  a  Bible  ranks  with  the  most  marvellous 
achievements  of  omniscient  ingenuity.  As  in  na¬ 
ture,  so  in  the  realm  of  grace,  the  very  simplicity 
of  God’s  solved  problems  often  disguises  from  us 
the  impossibilities  that  He  has  conquered.  Did 
we  but  look  more  closely,  we  should  wonder  vastly 
more. 

With  singular  aptness  just  this  may  be  said  of 
the  Bible.  God  has  made  it  a  book  of  truth — the 
book  of  the  greatest,  sublimest,  deepest  and  broad¬ 
est  truth  that  the  world  knows— in  spite  of  the 
human  disqualifications  which  everywhere  must 
clog  the  project  of  revealing  infinite  realities  to 
finite  understanding.  His  methods  have  taken  ac¬ 
count  of  the  obstacles  and  have  overcome  them 
with  the  same  practical  directness  which  the 
world’s  best  engineers  learn  from  the  tutelage  of 
nature.  When  the  resistance  of  a  transmission 
wire  hinders  the  producer  of  electric  power  from 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


53 


sending  a  greater  current  through  that  one  medium, 
he  does  not  despair  of  distributing  the  energy 
which  his  dynamos  are  generating;  he  parallels 
the  loaded  cable  with  another  of  equal  capacity. 
And  the  new  wire,  with  all  later  fellows  strung  on 
the  same  circuit  of  distribution,  not  only  carries  its 
own  load  of  power  but  by  induction  intensifies  the 
service  of  every  comrade  in  the  task. 

It  is  by  means  very  like  this  that  God  sends 
down  to  men  the  vital  power  of  the  Spirit  which 
His  Bible  is  effectually  devised  to  carry.  Had  He 
used  but  the  one  lone  wire  of  any  single  mind  to 
diffuse  to  the  world  His  truth,  the  whole  truth 
could  never  have  been  communicated  in  any  re¬ 
ligious  sufficiency.  Not  the  most  capacious  hu¬ 
man  brain  escapes  restrictions  that  narrow  the  re¬ 
ceptive  faculties  of  the  soul;  were  God  to  bestow 
all  spiritual  knowledge  on  some  one  favoured  serv¬ 
ant  of  His,  the  treasure  would  inevitably  overflow 
the  vessel  and  run  to  waste.  Still  more,  the  in¬ 
evitable  bent  of  peculiarity  which  makes  every 
man  his  special  and  individual  self,  forbids  the 
hope  that  God’s  messages  could  traverse  any  hu¬ 
man  intellect  without  being  subject  to  some  per¬ 
sonal  diffraction  in  the  passage.  To  use  more  than 
one  medium  is  the  necessary  means  of  cancelling 
this  factor  of  human  idiosyncrasy. 

In  revealing  His  salvation  to  the  world,  there¬ 
fore,  God  must  plan  multiple  transmission.  Not 
one  prophet  but  many;  not  a  sole  and  lonely 
apostle  but  a  varied  group;  not  a  single  psalmist 
but  a  guild  of  singers;  not  an  outstanding  unique 


54 


THE  TRUTH  OP  THE  MESSAGE 


historian  but  a  multitude  of  chroniclers — by  these 
He  made  sure  of  imparting  to  men  the  rich  full¬ 
ness  of  a  manifolded  Gospel.  It  is  not  only 
ampler  in  content  than  any  single  voice  could  have 
conveyed,  but  it  is  richer  in  colour*  taking  bril¬ 
liance  from  every  faithful  personality  who  has 
been  divinely  used  to  contribute  to  it.  The  many 
prisms  that  pass  along  the  light  impart  to  the  Bible 
an  alluring  variety  of  hue  and  tint  like  to  the 
iridescence  by  which  in  nature  the  dewdrop  and 
rainbow  are  bejewelled. 

Saying  all  this,  we  must  not  forget  that  in  the 
noonday  of  this  Bible  revelation  there  came  One 
who  spake  like  never  man  spake  or  could  speak. 
In  this  “  crystal  Christ  ”  there  was  found  and  in 
His  voice  there  was  heard,  as  Lanier  said,  no  “  if 
or  yet.”  And  the  reverence  of  the  world  from 
that  day  till  now  continues  to  bear  witness  that 
His  words  measured  a  wholeness  of  truth  such  as 
humanity  has  seen  no  other  of  its  teachers  able 
to  compass.  Age  succeeds  age,  since  He  lived  on 
earth  and  left  it,  and  still  there  is  nothing  to  sub¬ 
tract  from  His  sayings  nor  anything  to  add  save 
what  echoes  their  wisdom.  Were  there  no  other 
argument  for  the  supernaturally  supreme  character 
which  the  New  Testament  ascribes  to  the  Central 
Person  of  its  story,  the  circumferential  complete¬ 
ness  of  His  preaching — fragmentally  reported 
though  it  was — would  remain  in  glowing  contrast 
to  the  fractional  emphasis  of  every  other  religious 
leader  throughout  all  time,  and  would  refute  every 
explanation  of  the  difference  except  the  explana- 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


55 


tion  which  sets  Him  higher  than  all  others  of 
earth. 

Even  in  connection  with  His  incomparable  life 
and  words,  however,  the  point  of  argument  in  this 
study  comes  again  into  convincing  view.  If  Jesus 
comprehended  the  complete  circled  unity  of  truth 
as  no  man  might,  the  four  Gospels  are  yet  a 
graphic  demonstration  that  even  among  His  dis¬ 
ciples  none  obtained  from  Him  anything  like  an 
equal  catholicity  of  mind.  Those  nearest  to  Him, 
like  ourselves  to  this  day,  were  tied  to  personal 
points  of  view,  from  which  each  took  the  opinion 
and  estimate  of  the  Master  most  in  accord  with 
his  own  singularity  of  temperament  or  interest. 

If  but  the  Synoptic  Gospels  remained  to  us  we 
should  in  this  remote  day  of  the  Christian  epoch 
be  dwelling  far  too  exclusively  on  the  human  traits 
of  our  Lord  and  the  human  elements  in  His  per¬ 
sonality.  If  on  the  other  hand  all  our  knowledge 
of  Jesus  were  supplied  to  us  by  the  story  which 
John  wrote,  the  Saviour  by  this  time  would  have 
become  an  almost  mystic  wraith,  of  whose  fleshly 
brotherhood  with  ourselves  we  should  perhaps  be 
in  despairing  doubt.  It  is  the  possession  of  all 
four  of  these  differing  pictures  of  the  Lord — for 
happily  even  the  portraits  of  the  synoptists  are  not 
absolute  duplicates — which,  like  the  duplex  vision  of 
a  man’s  two  eyes,  lifts  the  figure  of  Jesus  into  the 
roundness  of  distinct  and  embodied  vitality.  Who 
among  us  can  fail  of  gratitude  that  the  “  provi¬ 
dence  of  the  canon  ”  did  not  leave  us  depending 
on  but  a  single  biography  of  our  Master?  How 


56 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


poorly  we  should  know  Him  without  the  fourfold 
fullness  of  the  evangel  by  which  the  Holy  Spirit 
has  bequeathed  to  us  our  historic  knowledge  of 
Jesus. 

From  all  that  has  thus  been  said,  it  follows  that 
the  truth  of  Bible  revelation  is  reserved  for  him 
who  searches  for  it  not  in  a  part  of  the  Scriptures 
but  through  their  whole  range.  If  indeed  one  per¬ 
sists  in  confining  himself  within  given  portions 
which  seem  to  chime  with  some  characteristic  note 
of  his  thinking  or  experience,  it  cannot  be  said 
that  he  is  deceived.  An  observer  who  has  viewed 
some  mighty  mountain  mass  from  but  one  favourite 
outlook  has  certainly  seen  the  mountain.  He  may 
be  taken  as  a  true  witness  to  the  fact  of  the  moun¬ 
tain’s  greatness  and  solidity.  But  his  individual 
description  of  it  would  be  an  ill  guide  to  depend 
upon.  What  could  he  from  his  stationary  angle 
tell  of  the  mountain’s  aspects  of  grandeur  from 
various  points  of  observation,  its  compass,  its  en¬ 
vironing  features  ?  So  the  specialist  in  one  or  an¬ 
other  Bible  doctrine  as  gleaned  from  a  single  au¬ 
thor  or  a  special  passage,  may  not  be  said  to  be 
lost  from  truth.  But  it  is  not  safe  to  accept  him  as 
an  expositor  of  all  that  the  Bible  means  or  all  that 
truth  embodies.  Not  a  specialist  but  a  generalizer 
— one  who  walks  round  about  Jerusalem  to  tell 
all  the  towers  thereof — alone  can  approximate  true 
Biblical  theology. 

In  fact,  to  interpret  the  Bible  rightly  a  student 
of  the  Scriptures  needs  to  be  a  genius  in  synthesis. 
When  Paul  says  that  faith  saves  men,  he  is  right. 


THE  TEUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


57 


When  James  says  that  men  are  saved  by  works, 
he  is  right.  But  neither  apart  from  the  other  has 
the  truth.  It  is  idle  to  pretend,  as  some  have  done 
because  they  misconceive  what  inspiration  implies, 
that  both  apostles  are  saying  the  same  thing  under 
different  terms.  If  they  were  saying  the  same 
thing,  there  would  be  no  need  of  having  the  say¬ 
ings  of  both  in  the  Bible.  They  are  both  in  the 
Bible  because  the  partial  view  of  each  goes  to  help 
make  a  whole  view  of  the  facts  in  the  case,  as  the 
two  conceptions  are  not  contrasted  but  combined. 
One  mapped  one-half  of  the  great  mountain  peak 
of  salvation;  the  other  mapped  the  other  half. 
Put  the  two  together  and  you  will  know  the  whole 
noble  country  in  which  both  were  God-glorifying 
explorers. 

So  Paul’s  conception  of  God’s  stem  sovereignty 
and  John’s  passionate  vision  of  God’s  overflowing 
love  afford  but  fragmental  notions  of  God  when 
held  apart.  United  they  begin  to  unfold  the  true 
measure  of  the  divine  Greatness.  The  difference 
is  not  disputatious  but  complementary  and  corrob¬ 
orative.  Something  of  the  same  thing  requires 
to  be  said  of  the  Old  Testament  revelation  of  a 
God  concerned  to  use  one  special  nation  for  special 
purposes  in  His  providence  and  the  New  Testa¬ 
ment  revelation  of  a  God  loving  all  nations  with  an 
impartial  Fatherhood.  It  is  the  way  of  spiritual 
poverty  to  reject  one  of  those  thoughts — special 
or  universal  providence — and  take  the  other.  Let 
us  instead  be  rich  by  believing  both.  And  the 
pessimism  of  Ecclesiastes — if  a  man  fed  on  that 


58 


THE  TRUTH  OF  THE  MESSAGE 


alone  he  would  never  be  able  to  lift  his  voice  in 
any  sort  of  praise  to  God.  Yet  when  one  has 
given  over  his  whole  reckless  soul  to  gayety  and 
irresponsibility,  then  Ecclesiastes  is  the  very  salt  he 
needs  to  keep  his  life  from  putrefaction.  A  phar¬ 
macopoeia  for  every  spiritual  disease  is  the  Bible; 
a  cyclopaedia  of  all  spiritual  wisdom  too.  Not  less 
than  all  of  it  is  sufficient. 

Wherefore  God  had  to  take  care  to  make  the 
book  not  only  compact  enough,  as  we  have  said 
before,  but  also  capacious  enough. 


VII 


THE  BIBLE'S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


HOW  far  is  the  Bible  affected  by  the  hu¬ 
man  limitations  of  its  writers?  Like¬ 
wise,  in  what  degree  has  the  Bible  been 
limited  by  undeveloped  capacities,  either  intellec¬ 
tual  or  spiritual,  in  those  for  whom  immediately 
it  was  written,  who  were  the  first  to  be  religiously 
instructed  by  it? 

We  have  already  taken  into  account  one  limita¬ 
tion  which  the  most  jealous  interpreter  of  inspired 
Scripture  will  scarcely  be  at  pains  to  disallow.  It 
is  in  fact  a  restriction  which  seems  involved  neces¬ 
sarily  in  the  very  thought  of  divine  revelation. 
There  would  be  no  need  of  supernatural  reveal- 
ment  if  the  ideas  which  are  thereby  communi¬ 
cated  to  men  were  not  greater  in  reach  and  com¬ 
pass  than  the  native  measure  of  the  human  mind. 
It  is  well  to  recall  how  vividly  that  was  impressed 
on  the  consciousness  of  the  prophet  who  repeated 
God’s  reminder  of  it:  “For  as  the  heavens  are 
higher  than  the  earth,  so  are  my  ways  higher  than 
your  ways  and  my  thoughts  than  your  thoughts.” 

It  would  be  incredible  to  suppose  that  any  form 
of  inspiration  could  eliminate  this  disparity.  That 
virtually  would  be  eliminating  the  difference  be¬ 
tween  the  finite  and  the  Infinite.  A  human  being 
exalted  to  see  all  and  think  all  as  God  sees  and 


59 


60 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


thinks  could  hardly  be  counted  human  thereafter. 
Certainly  no  man  in  the  long  succession  of  mes¬ 
sengers  by  whom  our  Bible  came  to  us  can  be 
thought  to  have  enjoyed  the  inspiration  of  God 
in  higher  form  than  the  Apostle  Paul.  And  he  has 
let  us  know  very  plainly  that  he  had  no  sense  of 
having  been  elevated  thereby  to  any  transcendent 
level  of  intelligence.  He  meekly  included  himself 
along  with  all  the  fellow-believers  to  whom  he 
wrote  when  he  said  not  only,  “We  know  in  part,” 
but  as  well,  “We  prophesy  in  part.” 

Paul  in  his  epistles  wrote  truth  as  best  he  saw 
it,  but  he  never  for  a  moment  imagined  that  he  was 
furnishing  to  the  Church  on  earth  a  transcript 
complete  of  the  endless  counsels  of  heaven.  Only 
in  an  after  life  and  in  a  far  diviner  atmosphere, 
“  when  that  which  is  perfect  is  come,”  did  he  hope 
to  “  see  face  to  face  ”  and  to  “  know  fully  ”  even 
as  by  the  all-seeing  and  unconditioned  knowledge 
of  God  he  had  always  “  been  fully  known.”  No, 
it  would  not  have  been  the  Apostle  Paul  who  would 
care  to  dispute  the  statement  that  even  the  inspired 
Scriptures  partake  in  this  present  world  of  the 
partialness  which  affects  all  things  done  by  the 
hands  and  through  the  agency  of  man. 

There  follows  from  this  a  consequence  which 
cannot  be  blinked.  If,  as  we  have  said  in  a  pre¬ 
vious  study,  it  has  frequently  been  necessary  for 
the  Divine  Oversight  to  accumulate  the  testimony 
of  two  or  three  or  four  men  in  order  to  complete 
a  round  view  of  truth  whereof  individually  each 
saw  but  a  half,  a  third  or  a  quarter,  then  there 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


61 


runs  with  this  the  inevitable  risk  that  in  each  com¬ 
ponent  section  the  respective  author  may  have 
overemphasized  that  fractional  phase  of  truth 
which  he  peculiarly  felt. 

Not  appreciating  all  the  qualifying  facts,  he 
would  be  almost  certain  to  state  his  special  fact  too 
broadly.  Thus  in  regard  to  the  Old  Testament 
conception  of  God  as  the  national  protector  of  His 
chosen  Israel  (which,  as  has  already  been  noted, 
had  eventually  to  be  rounded  out  by  the  New 
Testament  revelation  of  God’s  impartial  compas¬ 
sion  for  all  mankind),  it  is  plain  that  until  this 
complemental  truth  did  dawn  on  the  people  of 
Jehovah  they  misunderstood  very  many  things 
about  God’s  will  for  other  nations  and  therefore  in 
some  cases  at  least  misjudged  what  was  just  and 
right  in  their  relations  to  neighbouring  nationali¬ 
ties.  Assuredly  then  it  can  be  considered  no  mat¬ 
ter  of  wonder  if  portions  of  Scripture  written  dur¬ 
ing  the  period  when  the  nation  of  Israel  enter¬ 
tained  such  circumscribed  ideas  of  God  are  now 
discovered  to  bear  evidence  of  those  restricted 
views,  resulting  in  overstressed  sympathy  with 
nationalistic  prejudices  then  current. 

Nobody  who  really  believes  in  God  will  make 
any  doubt  that  God  was  entirely  able,  in  even  so 
primitive  and  illiberal  an  epoch,  to  lay  hold  on 
some  extraordinary  man  and  illuminate  him  with 
all  the  world  vision  that  thrilled  the  souls  of  Paul 
and  John  in  apostolic  days.  God  can  do  any 
miracle  that  He  pleases.  But  He  does  even  His 
miracles  according  to  law — the  law  of  progress  by 


62 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


which  He  steadily  presses  on  from  epoch  to  epoch 
to  fulfill  His  cosmic  projects.  Never  yet  has  God 
been  found  using  a  miracle  to  provide  for  impa¬ 
tience  a  quick  road  to  eternal  results.  And  surely 
He  did  no  such  thing  in  providing  for  man  a  Bible. 
Let  us  reverently  say,  He  took  His  time  to  it. 

When  therefore  the  Holy  Scriptures  began  to 
take  form,  the  Divine  Power  attempted  no  sudden 
“  tour  de  force  ”  which  might  have  created  over 
night  a  volume  of  ultimate  perfection  up  to  the 
level  of  what  were  to  be  civilized  man’s  peak  at¬ 
tainments  in  thought  and  idealism.  Had  it  been 
such  a  book  into  which  God  put  His  revelation  of 
Himself,  it  would  have  been  a  useless  mystery  to 
the  patriarchal  ages.  Perhaps  it  would  be  still  a 
sealed  riddle  even  to  our  time.  A  vain  human 
experimenter  might  have  done  so  futile  a  thing 
as  that  if  he  had  had  the  power.  God  knew  better. 
It  is  not  a  cabalistic  Bible  which  we  have. 

The  real  fact  is  that  our  Father  in  heaven — this 
too  we  have  already  said — was  from  the  first 
working  for  His  children  in  each  age  of  history 
just  where  they  were  and  as  they  were.  He  was 
imposing  on  them  no  cryptograms  which  would 
have  to  be  left  for  some  rarer  race  of  wiseacres  in 
unforeseen  time  ahead  to  interpret.  Like  a  true  Fa¬ 
ther  He  sent  His  messages  in  language  which  then 
and  there  His  sons  and  daughters  might  receive  un- 
derstandingly.  He  spoke  to  them,  that  is  to  say,  by 
men  of  their  own  time  and  their  own  tongue.  A 
prophet  miraculously  thrust  forward  into  touch 
with  the  ideas  and  reasonings,  the  discoveries  and 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT  63 


inventions,  of  some  century  then  veiled  in  the 
cloudland  of  the  future,  could  have  said  nothing 
comprehensible  to  his  contemporaries.  The 
prophet  had  to  be  a  man  of  his  own  day.  What 
he  said  and  what  he  wrote  was  primarily  for  the 
inspiriting,  the  guidance,  the  reclamation,  of  men 
and  women  all  around  him. 

Not  that  any  Bible-writer  was  ever  just  one  in 
a  crowd.  Always  God’s  message-bearer  has  to  be 
somebody  a  little  way  ahead.  Otherwise  he  would 
not  know  what  to  call  the  people  forward  to.  And 
the  divine  word  is  always  a  call  to  be  moving  on. 
Yet  the  voice  which  speaks  for  God  must  not  be 
too  far  in  advance  if  it  is  to  sound  loud  in  the 
ears  of  the  called.  So  always  there  are  tones  and 
accents  in  it  but  a  little  less  rude  and  crude  than 
the  mass  speech  of  the  hour.  If  the  message  is 
put  in  writing,  there  are  sure  to  be  finger  prints  of 
the  current  generation  here  and  there  on  the  manu¬ 
script.  An  absolutely  timeless  literary  work  may 
or  may  not  be  conceivable.  But  there  is  at  least  no 
such  thing  in  the  Bible. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  from  material  of  this 
sort,  which  seems  too  timely  and  too  popular  to 
be  anything  but  evanescent,  it  appears  an  improb¬ 
able,  if  not  impossible,  hope  to  expect  the  evolution 
of  a  standard  religious  book  on  which  later  ages 
might  rely  as  a  permanent  guide  to  the  will  and 
work  of  God.  And  so  it  would  be  if  there  were 
naught  but  impersonal  evolution  behind  it.  But 
because  the  design  of  a  foreseeing  and  choosing 
heavenly  Father  is  there,  the  hope  is  not  vain. 


64 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


No  doubt,  out  of  all  that  the  Holy  Spirit  has 
prompted  men  to  write  in  times  past  for  the  relig¬ 
ious  teaching  of  humanity,  the  great  overplus  has 
been  too  deeply  contaminated  with  the  transient 
bias  of  a  half-instructed  world  for  any  use  to  be 
made  of  it  in  a  perpetuated  Bible.  But  here  and 
there  the  Omniscient  Eye  has  discovered  some 
mighty  document  so  full  of  burning  vision  of 
spiritual  realities,  so  vibrant  with  the  actual  experi¬ 
ence  of  souls  in  touch  with  the  Soul  Divine,  that 
providence  could  by  no  means  afford  to  let  it  dis¬ 
appear  from  the  sacred  treasures  of  religion.  What 
then  if,  on  the  surface  of  so  invaluable  a  witness 
to  things  unseen  but  eternal,  there  should  appear 
exposed  certain  blemishes  of  inadequate  or  even 
distorted  understanding?  Will  God  cast  away  all 
the  brilliant  wealth  of  its  truth  because  there  cling 
to  it  some  minor  fragments  of  human  imperfec¬ 
tion? 

Perhaps  He  must  have  done  so  if  there  had  been 
no  other  way  of  setting  right  the  misapprehensions 
involved.  But  He  had  another  way.  Down  the 
vista  of  coming  days  God  saw  a  time  when  His 
servants  would  comprehend  more  clearly  the 
subtler  spiritual  facts  of  which  a  former  age  was 
uncertain.  So  the  divine  Editor  needed  not  to 
discard  what  was  “  written  aforetime,”  even 
though  marked  by  the  lacks  and  insufficiencies  of 
the  period.  Well  He  knew  that  later  “  men  after 
his  own  heart  ”  would  complete  this  insufficient 
truth,  and  in  the  perfected  Bible  its  positive  testi¬ 
monies  would  count  for  sustenance  of  faith,  while 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


65 


all  its  negative  defects  would  be  absorbed  in  the 
adequacy  of  the  book  entire. 

Such  a  method  of  building  up  a  book  of  reve¬ 
lation  might  be  judged  quite  inconsistent  with  the 
character  of  God — whose  own  perfections  invite 
confidence  in  the  unqualified  perfection  of  all  His 
works — if  it  were  not  for  our  constant  observa¬ 
tion  of  the  like  means  by  which  He  trains  the  race 
of  humanity  in  all  other  concerns  of  life.  Every¬ 
where  He  educates  men  from  smaller  to  greater 
by  processes  which  leave  more  for  them  to  find 
out  than  He  tells  them — more  for  them  to  do  than 
He  does  for  them.  Not  the  instantaneous  fiat  of 
His  own  will  which  makes  all  things  perfect  at  a 
stroke,  but  the  patient  progress  of  step  by  step 
which  leads  men  to  higher  knowing  and  broader 
seeing  and  deeper  feeling,  while  the  guiding  God 
walks  beside  them,  is  His  manifest  preference  for 
achieving  His  objects  in  this  world — whatever 
may  be  His  working  plan  elsewhere  in  creation. 

In  that  original  home  of  man  which  the  Bible 
has  taught  us  to  call  the  Garden  of  Eden,  there 
were  present  all  the  forces  which  to-day  light  the 
lamps  and  move  the  enginery  of  civilization,  and 
God,  had  He  wished,  might  have  begun  history 
with  the  steam  and  electricity  of  a  modern  me¬ 
tropolis.  But  He  made  known  to  humanity  in  the 
morning  of  its  annals  no  more  than  the  secret  of 
turning  the  soil  and  planting  the  seed ;  as  the  Bible 
expresses  it,  “  Jehovah  took  the  man  and  put  him 
into  the  garden  to  dress  it  and  to  keep  it.”  And 
from  that  simple  start  in  primitive  agriculture 


66 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


God  left  the  man  to  climb,  with  strengths  divinely 
provided  but  humanly  exercised,  to  the  pinnacle 
of  present  science,  where  physically  puny  humam 
ity  controls  powers  of  nature  which  antiquity 
never  dreamed  that  the  hierarchies  of  heaven  itself 
might  wield. 

It  surely  cannot  be  deemed  ungodlike  if  for 
man’s  spiritual  training  an  analogous  progress  is 
traceable  in  divine  revelation.  It  may  be  counted 
sure  that  in  the  life  of  the  soul  as  in  the  life  of  the 
body  the  Creator  would  establish  man  with  capital 
enough  to  live  by  from  the  beginning.  The  earli¬ 
est  life  entitled  to  be  called  human  had  a  conscious¬ 
ness  of  God — turned  to  God  as  the  earliest  flower 
turned  to  the  sun- — and  dimly  at  least  appreciated 
that  pleasing  God  was  the  secret  of  all  well-being. 
In  primeval  time,  as  always  since,  God  “  left  not 
himself  without  witness.”  But  it  was  manifestly 
not  His  will  to  show  all  in  one  blinding  dazzle  of 
illumination.  His  messages  were  destined  to 
44  grow  from  more  to  more.”  As  He  had  planted 
in  the  human  soul  that  inextinguishable  instinct 
which  ever  prompts  mankind  to  “  seek  God  if 
haply  they  might  feel  after  him  and  find  him,” 
so  He  provided  for  them  the  reward  of  something 
ever  remaining  to  be  learned — which  is  likewise 
his  reward  who  seeks  God  through  nature. 

Till  “  the  fullness  of  the  time  came  ”  the  Fa¬ 
ther  even  delayed  to  let  shine  on  men  “  the  light 
of  the  knowledge  of  the  glory  of  God  in  the  face 
of  Jesus  Christ.”  And  still,  after  the  calendar  of 
men’s  redemption  had  brought  round  the  day  when 


THE  BIBLE’S  HUMAN  ELEMENT 


67 


the  “  very  image  ”  of  the  Father  must  needs  be 
seen  on  earth,  there  remained  much  yet  to  be  re¬ 
vealed  and  be  learned — things  which,  as  Jesus 
Himself  said,  His  dearest  disciples  were  not  yet 
prepared  to  hear.  Even  with  the  Bible  complete, 
knowledge  was  and  is  not  complete.  The  Spirit 
of  truth,  as  the  Lord  Himself  promised,  even  yet 
leads  into  truth  those  who  love  the  truth. 

The  thought  then  of  progressive  revelation  need 
offend  no  one  who  is  not  offended  by  progressive 
science.  Each  is  of  God — each  by  the  wisdom  of 
Him  who  knows  all  is  conditioned  on  and  adapted 
to  His  faith  in  humanity’s  capacity  to  know  more. 
Likewise  let  us  be  sure  that  one  process  quite  as 
much  as  the  other  is  under  God’s  providential 
guidance,  guaranteeing  both  against  frustration  or 
incorrigible  deflection.  The  heavenly  Overseer 
has  always  taken  care  that  the  world  had  men  in 
it  with  the  spirit  of  quest  desiring  to  know  earthly 
things.  So  likewise  have  there  never  failed  men 
having  the  spirit  of  quest  desiring  to  know 
heavenly  things.  Of  these  latter,  in  the  ages  when 
the  Bible  was  building,  came  forth  the  authors  of 
what  are  now  our  Scriptures.  They  sought  to 
know.  God  met  them  and  told  them.  Then  they 
wrote  and  what  they  wrote  God  preserved  for  us. 
No  common  men  were  they;  they  were  great  men 
attaining  an  ineffable  companionship  in  high  re¬ 
gions  beyond  the  ken  of  the  earth-bound.  And 
it  was  the  reality  of  that  spiritual  greatness  which 
made  them  fit  to  write  of  God — fit  to  be  the  re¬ 
ligious  benefactors  of  the  world  to  this  day. 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


IT  may  dismay  some  to  realize  that  what  has 
just  been  said  about  human  limitations  in  the 
Bible  forestalls  the  possibility  of  establishing 
for  the  book  a  claim  to  inerrancy — which  by  many 
is  considered  to  be  the  essential  verifying  quality 
inseparable  from  divine  inspiration.  In  some  sec¬ 
tions  of  nearly  all  Protestant  bodies  it  is  a  prac¬ 
tically  unquestioned  dogma  that  if  any  error  of 
any  sort  were  demonstrably  discovered  anywhere 
within  the  covers  of  the  Holy  Bible,  the  whole 
book  by  that  fact  would  be  stripped  of  any  ra¬ 
tional  title  to  a  status  of  divine  authority.  Others, 
a  little  less  positive  on  this  point,  say  simply  that 
if  any  portion  of  the  book  were  found  to  contain 
erroneous  statements,  that  portion  would  have  to 
be  excluded  from  the  range  of  inspired  Scripture. 
And  there  are  many  unbelievers  who,  taking  these 
friends  of  the  Bible  at  their  word,  point  out  what 
they  regard  as  undeniable  errors  on  certain  Bible 
pages,  and  by  that  consideration  alone  assume  that 
they  have  set  themselves  free  from  every  obliga¬ 
tion  to  heed  or  even  respect  the  volume. 

Therefore  one  who  has  spoken  of  deficiencies  in 
the  Scriptures  which  appear  to  result  from  the 
ignorance  or  incompetence  of  the  times  in  which 
they  were  written,  has  risked  the  peril  of  paining 

68 


THE  MIBAGE  OP  INEBB ANCY 


69 


a  host  of  devout  Bible-lovers — or,  better  said, 
Bible-trusters.  It  behooves  such  a  one,  then,  to 
hasten  to  make  clear  that  the  power  of  the  Bible 
— its  worth,  its  right  to  speak  to  human  souls,  its 
conveyance  of  the  message  from  God — do  not  de¬ 
pend  on  inerrancy  and  are  not  vacated  when  the 
student  of  the  Scriptures  abandons  the  effort  to 
show  that  the  Bible  is  a  book  of  no  mistakes. 

To  be  sure,  it  is  easy  to  conceive  mistakes  which 
would  invalidate  the  Scriptures — mistakes  about 
God,  mistakes  about  the  duty  of  man  toward  God, 
mistakes  about  the  right  way  of  living  amid  one’s 
fellow  men;  such  errors,  if  pervading  the  Bible  as 
a  whole  and  standing  unmodified  by  any  later  and 
superseding  instruction,  would  indeed  render  the 
book  morally  untrustworthy  and  spiritually  mis¬ 
leading.  But  we  have  already  set  forth,  in  part 
at  least,  the  reasons  why  evangelical  Christianity 
holds  by  the  faith  that  in  the  Bible  we  have  God’s 
great  bequeathed  guide-book  designed  to  direct  the 
feet  of  men  into  the  paths  of  divine  fellowship 
and  divine  obedience.  To  that  faith  it  is  indeed 
an  indispensable  corollary  that  the  guide-book 
must  guide  to  the  true  path ;  any  other  imputation 
would  “  make  of  none  effect  the  faithfulness  of 
God.” 

If  the  Bible  is  not  to  be  relied  on  as  an  agency 
of  what  we  have  defined  as  its  supreme  purpose 
— the  consummation  of  vital  intercommunion  be¬ 
tween  man  and  God;  if  it  will  not  lead  to  that 
consummation  the  man  who  comes  to  it  with  a 
hunger  for  God  in  his  soul — then  all  too  surely 


70 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


God  is  not  in  the  book.  But  if  it  does  by  the 
exhortation  of  its  counsels  and  the  example  of  its 
living  personalities — especially  its  chief  Person¬ 
ality — show  men  the  way  to  live  for,  with  and  in 
their  divine  Lord  and  Saviour,  then  by  a  far 
greater  surety  God  is  in  the  book.  That  the  latter 
is  the  constant  and  indefeasible  fact  about  the  in¬ 
fluence  of  the  Bible  among  mankind,  evangelical 
theology  has  steadfastly  believed  from  the  Refor¬ 
mation  onward,  and  the  historic  expression  of  that 
confidence  is  the  affirmation  that  with  reference 
to  faith  and  practice  the  Holy  Scriptures  offer— 
not  an  inerrant  but— an  infallible  standard  of  spir¬ 
itual  instruction. 

On  the  dictionary  page  there  may  appear  but  a 
figment  of  difference  between  these  two  adjectives 
— “  infallible  ”  and  “  inerrant  ” — and  from  that 
viewpoint  the  attempt  to  assign  them  diverse 
meanings  may  seem  an  artificial  play  with  words. 
But  the  atmosphere  which  surrounds  the  two 
terms  in  the  field  of  theological  discussion  affords 
full  reason  for  saying  that  the  Bible  by  no  means 
needs  to  be  inerrant  in  order  to  be  infallible.  The 
two  phrasings  do  not  paint  the  same  picture. 
When  “  infallible  ”  is  the  word  used,  there  rises 
on  one’s  vision  a  mighty  thought  of  power  and 
authority  radiating  from  the  Bible  as  a  central 
luminary  in  the  moral  sky  just  as  energy  radiates 
from  the  daily  sun  in  the  firmament  of  heaven. 
But  when  one  says  “  inerrant,”  the  suggestion  to 
the  mind  is  rather  a  picking  and  paltering  over 
trifles,  a  persistence  about  the  insignificant — as  if 


THE  MIEAGE  OF  LNEBBANCY 


71 


a  man  perishing  with  cold  should  refuse  to  warm 
himself  at  a  fire  until  he  had  ascertained  that  no 
stick  longer  or  shorter  than  twenty-four  inches 
was  burning  in  the  blazing  pile.  So  indeed  there 
are  Bible  students  who  bother  endlessly  about  the 
sticks  in  the  fire-heap — just  how  this  text  should 
be  laid  on  or  across  that  other  text — and  they 
never  get  a  flame  started  that  will  warm  either 
themselves  or  anybody  else.  For  many  such  peo¬ 
ple  it  would  be  a  great  relief  of  soul  if  from  their 
small  fussiness  they  could  be  delivered  into  the 
large  knowledge  that  what  signifies  for  the  faith 
of  a  Christian  is  a  Bible  to  be  depended  on  in  the 
whole  bulk  of  its  truth — to  which  inerrancy  in 
mere  detail  could  add  not  a  featherweight  of 
worth. 

That  this  is  not  a  position  perilous  to  the  spirit 
or  untenable  for  the  mind,  all  believers  may  re¬ 
assure  themselves  by  remembering  that  the  claim 
to  be  without  errors  of  human  misinformation  is 
a  claim  that  the  Bible  never  makes  for  itself.  It 
is  true,  indeed,  that  extensive  elements  in  the  early 
histories  of  the  Bible  and  in  the  prophets — the 
major  prophets  especially — are  set  down  as  direct 
quotations  from  the  mouth  of  Jehovah.  Notable 
in  the  materials  so  sanctioned  is  the  Mosaic  law, 
almost  every  section  of  which  is  introduced  by  the 
standardized  phrase,  “  Jehovah  spake  unto  Moses.” 
But  there  is  no  hint  in  history  or  prophecy  of  any 
means  other  than  honest  human  memory  employed 
to  guarantee  the  Biblical  record  of  Jehovah’s 
words.  Indeed,  it  is  possible  without  irreverence 


72 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


to  affirm  that  in  the  case  of  the  most  permanently 
important  of  those  divinely  spoken  laws — the  ten 
commandments — the  transcription  into  Israel's 
statute  books  was  not  letter-perfect.  Memory  and 
record — even  though  the  record  is  said  to  have 
existed  for  centuries  in  graven  stone — have  failed 
to  preserve  for  us  the  knowledge  of  what  exactly 
God  said  when  He  spoke  out  of  the  clouds  of 
Sinai  to  the  awed  Hebrew  tribes  massed  in  the 
plain  below. 

If  this  appears  startling  to  any  Bible  reader, 
he  needs  only  to  compare  the  twentieth  chapter  of 
Exodus  with  the  fifth  chapter  of  Deuteronomy 
and  note  the  differences  between  the  recital  of  the 
ten  commandments  in  those  two  passages.  It  is 
quite  true  that  the  differences  are  of  no  conse¬ 
quence  as  relates  to  the  moral  force  of  the  deca¬ 
logue;  the  reader  gets  from  one  passage  just  as 
well  as  from  the  other  the  will  of  God  for  the 
conduct  of  life.  But  the  point  here  is  that  the 
conveyance  of  that  eternal  truth  is  accomplished 
without  any  changeless  crystallization  of  the  words 
used. 

The  main  divergencies,  as  any  student  may  see 

for  himself,  are  in  the  fourth  commandment.  Ex- 

>• 

odus  tells  that  God  gave  as  a  reason  for  the  sacred¬ 
ness  of  the  Sabbath  His  own  rest  after  the  com¬ 
pletion  of  creation,  and  the  form  of  statement  in¬ 
dicates  that  it  had  already  been  a  hallowed  day  as 
long  as  the  world  had  stood.  Deuteronomy  pre¬ 
sents  the  Sabbath  institution  as  a  memorial  newly 
established  to  keep  the  Israelites  reminded  of  their 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


73 


deliverance  from  Egypt.  It  may  be  held  that  God 
named  both  reasons.  But  that,  if  it  is  considered 
to  be  really  probable,  would  only  reemphasize  the 
point  which  is  here  being  stressed,  for  in  that  event 
neither  record  affords  an  exact  transcript.  The 
ten  commandments  are  infallible  without  doubt — 
all  the  consent  of  moral  thinking  throughout  the 
ages  testifies  to  that.  But  the  form  in  which  we 
have  them  cannot  possibly  be  shown  to  be  inerrant. 

The  dogmatic  faith  of  the  Church  has  always, 
and  the  personal  faith  of  the  Christian  has  nearly 
as  invariably,  attributed  to  the  words  of  Jesus 
Christ  a  divine  authority  no  less  than  the  formula, 
“  Thus  saith  Jehovah,”  imparts  to  those  passages 
to  which  it  is  attached  in  the  Old  Testament.  Yet 
here  the  test  of  inerrancy  fails  even  more  obviously 
than  in  the  older  writings.  There  has  heretofore 
been  discussed  the  ground  for  saying  that  the 
quadruple  story  of  the  Gospels  which  the  Holy 
Spirit  has  provided  in  our  Bible  affords  the  later 
world  a  much  more  realistic  appreciation  of  the 
great  soul  of  Jesus  Christ  than  any  single  biog¬ 
raphy  could  have  furnished.  But  it  is  equally  true 
(though  minutely  less  important  in  comparison) 
that  these  four  accounts,  when  set  side  by  side, 
compel  us  to  realize  that  we  shall  never  know  the 
exact  terms  in  which  the  Lord  put  some  of  His 
most  graphic  sayings  nor  the  precise  circumstances 
surrounding  some  of  the  greatest  moments  of  His 
experience  in  this  world. 

Take  for  example  His  beatitudes.  Did  He  say, 
“  Blessed  are  ye  poor,”  or  did  He  say,  “  Blessed 


74 


THE  MIEAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


are  the  poor  in  spirit  ”  ?  Luke  repeats  the  utter¬ 
ance  in  the  first  form;  Matthew  in  the  second. 
Sometimes  with  such  various  readings  the  student 
may  say  that  the  difference  makes  no  difference; 
the  idea  conveyed  is  the  same  under  either  form. 
But  here  there  is  contrast  not  only  of  words  but  of 
sense.  We  should  be  able  to  tell  very  much  more 
than  we  do  now  about  the  attitude  of  Jesus  to¬ 
ward  the  economic  conditions  of  life  if  we  could 
be  sure  whether  when  He  spoke  of  blessed  poverty 
He  was  thinking  of  the  lack  of  worldly  goods  or 
of  the  absence  of  religious  pride  among  those 
whom  He  delighted  to  count  as  His  friends. 

So  likewise  is  there  considerable  spread  of  dis¬ 
tinction  between  what  was  meant  by  the  Master  if 
He  said,  “  The  kingdom  of  God  is  among  you,” 
and  what  He  meant  if  He  said,  “  The  kingdom  of 
God  is  within  you.”  The  first  would  give  the 
kingdom  a  time  mark;  the  second  a  character 
mark.  It  is  the  latter  meaning  which  men  of  our 
day  would  rather  cling  to.  But  till  the  end  of 
time  no  man  in  this  world  will  know  surely  which 
was  the  sense  the  Lord  had  in  mind.  The  un¬ 
certainty  here,  however,  arises  not  from  varying 
reports  by  different  witnesses  but  from  the  am¬ 
biguity  of  the  language  in  which  the  saying  has 
been  kept  for  us.  Probably  the  Master’s  meaning 
was  entirely  clear  to  those  who  heard  Him  say 
this  thing  in  His  native  Aramaic.  But  the  trans¬ 
lation  into  Greek  brought  obscurity  because  the 
translator  blundered  into  a  grammatical  usage 
capable  of  two  constructions.  This  confusion  of 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


75 


sense,  however,  could  alter  little  the  later 
Church’s  apprehension  of  the  character  and  mis¬ 
sion  of  Jesus;  interesting  therefore  as  it  would  be 
for  us  to  learn  just  what  Christ  did  say,  who 
would  dare  to  think  that,  simply  for  the  satisfac¬ 
tion  of  our  curiosity,  the  supervising  Spirit  would 
concern  Himself  to  prevent  or  remedy  so  tiny  a 
flaw  in  so  great  a  story? 

Among  those  who  regard  inerrancy  as  indis¬ 
pensable  in  an  inspired  Bible,  it  is  customary, 
where  seeming  contradictions  appear  on  the  sur¬ 
face  of  Biblical  passages,  to*  try  to  maintain  the 
principle  by  “  reconciling  ”  these  discrepancies. 
This  process  consists  in  working  out  some  theory 
of  the  circumstances  under  which  it  would  be  pos¬ 
sible  for  both  diverse  statements  to  be  literally 
true.  Much  skillful  conjecture  has  been  spent  on 
this  means  of  justifying  the  accuracy  of  the  Bible, 
and  it  cannot  be  denied  that  in  numerous  instances 
plausible  explanations  have  been  hit  on;  some  of 
them  may  actually  reconstruct  from  differing  ac¬ 
counts  the  ampler  details  of  what  in  fact  did  hap¬ 
pen.  But  far  oftener  the  adjustment  of  one  ac¬ 
count  to  another  is  accomplished  by  surmises  so 
far  fetched  that  no  one  would  think  of  indulging 
them  if  a  supposed  necessity  did  not  demand  the 
reconciliation  at  all  costs. 

No  matter  how  successfully  this  interweaving 
of  varied  stories  is  carried  out,  however,  it  does 
not  improve  the  case  for  the  advocates  of  iner¬ 
rancy.  If  precise  exactitude  in  details  were  a  re¬ 
quired  mark  of  a  God-inspired  writing,  then  ob- 


76 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


viously  it  would  be  impossible  to  regard  as  in¬ 
spired  the  individual  writings  in  which  occur  para¬ 
graphs  that  need  to  be  thus  “  reconciled  ”  before 
they  give  the  right  impression.  Severally  consid¬ 
ered,  each  unit  on  this  assumption  must  give  a 
wrong  impression.  And  it  is  to  be  remembered 
that  most  of  the  sixty-six  documents  now  bound 
together  in  our  Bible  were  first  put  forth  in  in¬ 
dependent  form,  and  their  original  readers  could 
not  have  had  opportunity  to  compare  them  with 
the  other  Bible  writings  with  which  they  are  now 
associated.  The  supposed  clarification  to-day  pur¬ 
sued  so  diligently  was  therefore  in  the  beginning 
impossible,  and  readers  at  that  time  were  certainly 
led  into  opinions  of  fact  which  present-day  recon¬ 
cilers  would  consider  erroneous,  because  the  data 
from  parallel  accounts,  by  which  it  is  claimed  that 
fuller  facts  are  now  made  apparent,  were  not  then 
available. 

Thus  an  early  Christian  who  might  have  in  hand 
only  Mark’s  Gospel  would  suppose  that  Jesus  re¬ 
stored  sight  to  only  one  blind  man  when  He  passed 
out  of  Jericho  on  His  last  journey  to  Jerusalem. 
Not  till  the  believer  read  Matthew  would  he  know 
that  there  were  two  blind  men  there,  both  of  whom 
were  blessed  by  the  healing  power  of  the  Christ. 
And  then  after  he  got  hold  of  the  Gospel  by  Luke, 
he  would  be  entirely  uncertain  whether  the  one 
man  or  the  two  men  healed  had  met  the  Lord 
when  He  passed  out  of  Jericho  or  when  He  was 
coming  into  the  town.  Similarly  four  persons  who 
read  respectively  the  four  separate  accounts  of 


THE  MIEAGE  OF  INEBEANCY 


77 


Peter’s  tragic  denial  of  the  Lord  would  have  in 
mind  four  quite  different  groups  of  incidents. 
The  best  reconciling  which  the  inerrancy  dog¬ 
matists  can  do  with  this  case  is  to  infer  that  Peter 
actually  denied  the  Lord  seven  times — which  dis¬ 
agrees  with  what  the  Lord  predicted  and  is  con¬ 
trary  to  the  impression  which  any  one  of  the 
evangelists  conveys  by  his  individual  story. 

Plainly,  records  that  in  minute  matters  of  cir¬ 
cumstance  are  brought  into  accord  only  by  rashly 
adventurous  guessing — which,  to  say  the  least,  is 
not  itself  inerrant — cannot  depend  for  their  value 
on  that  kind  of  microscopic  precision  which  iner¬ 
rancy  calls  for.  If  God  had  ever  intended  to  stake 
the  reputation  or  the  authority  of  the  Bible  on  a 
superhuman  accuracy  in  minor  and  incidental 
facts,  He  would  certainly  have  taken  care  to  make 
that  extraordinary  exactness  an  unmistakable  phe¬ 
nomenon.  There  is  no  evidential  value  for  in¬ 
spiration  to  be  drawn  from  the  sort  of  inerrancy 
which  to  a  cursory  reader  is  so  little  manifest  that 
he  thinks  he  sees  quite  the  opposite — the  same  kind 
of  harmless  inexactitude  that  he  would  expect  in 
all  story-telling  and  history-writing  by  average 
honest  men.  But  there  is  on  the  other  hand  a  vast 
gain  for  faith  and  immense  rest  for  troubled  minds 
when  the  simple  truth  is  recognized  that  in  pro¬ 
viding  for  an  inspired  book  of  religion  the  in¬ 
spiring  Spirit  saw  no  need  of  working  the  gigantic 
miracle  which  would  have  made  ordinary  fallible 
men  omniscient  in  minutiae.  Who  conceivably 
could  be  strengthened  in  faith  toward  the  Lord 


78 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


Christ  by  knowing  surely  whether  it  was  at  the 
east  gate  or  the  west  gate  of  Jericho  that  Bar- 
timseus  was  roused  to  hope  by  the  electric  word, 
“Jesus  of  Nazareth  passeth  by” ? 

Another  imagination  which  has  been  invoked 
by  the  same  dogma  is  still  more  futile — the  hy¬ 
pothesis  that  although  there  are  apparently  irre¬ 
concilable  discrepancies  in  the  Holy  Scriptures  as 
we  now  possess  them,  there  were  no  mistakes  and 
no  contradictions  in  the  original  manuscripts  as 
the  Bible  authors  penned  them.  All  errors  that 
can  be  traced  in  to-day’s  Bible  have  resulted,  ac¬ 
cording  to  this  theory,  from  the  blunders  of  copy¬ 
ists  and  translators  through  whose  hands  the  book 
came  down  to  us.  It  is  passing  strange  that  the 
architects  of  this  conception  cannot  see  that  it  is 
bound  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case  to  fall  and 
bury  them  in  its  ruins.  If  the  book  by  which  God 
conveys  His  law  and  Gospel  to  mankind  must  be 
historically  inerrant  in  order  to  be  religiously  in¬ 
fallible,  then  on  the  hypothesis  here  outlined  the 
revelation  of  God  perished  from  the  earth  ages 
ago — being  destroyed  by  the  incompetence  of  those 
who  transcribed  it  from  one  manuscript  to  another 
and  rendered  it  out  of  its  original  languages  into 
the  tongues  of  the  nations. 

The  logic  of  this  is  that  we  to-day  have  no  Bible 
at  all  to  which  any  divine  authority  can  be  at¬ 
tributed.  Who  then  was  this  God  who  could  at 
the  beginning  inspire  men  to  write  with  a  miracu¬ 
lous  accuracy  but  could  do  nothing  afterward  to 
control  the  errant  liabilities  of  those  other  disciples 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


79 


of  His  to  whom  He  left  the  preservation  of  the 
Scriptures?  Just  on  the  score  of  a  due  respect  to 
the  sufficiency  of  God’s  omnipotence,  it  is  far  more 
reverent,  instead  of  supposing  that  inspiration  was 
baffled  thus,  to  believe  that  God  never  tried  to 
abolish  honest  men’s  fallibilities  but  was  always 
content  to  reveal  His  truth  through  and  by  their 
natural  human  talents. 

There  is  a  great  maxim  dear  to  the  most  just 
and  most  enlightened  legal  minds — a  maxim 
drawn  from  ancient  Rome,  the  mother  of  the 
world’s  jurisprudence:  “The  law  cares  not  for 
trifles.”  It  is  a  maxim  which  theology  ought  to 
adopt  in  honour  of  the  heavenly  Father,  whose 
infinite  mind  is  the  native  home  of  law  as  well  as 
of  revelation,  and  whose  love  desires  for  mankind 
not  petty  securities  within  tight-closed  corrals  but 
abundant  life  along  the  wide  ranges  of  a  free  uni¬ 
verse.  “  God  cares  not  for  trifles.”  Certainly  it 
is  an  intellect  childishly  restricted  which  is  able 
to  imagine  Him  who  “  upholdeth  all  things  by  the 
word  of  his  power,”  sitting  in  the  central  ruler- 
ship  of  the  universe  with  concern  in  His  thought 
about  the  possibility  that  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke 
and  John  would  not  get  it  straight  whether  Peter 
denied  his  Lord  to  two  or  only  to  one  of  the  high 
priest’s  serving  maids. 

But  God  had  charged  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke  and 
John  to  make  known  to  the  world  the  mighty  fact 
that  their  Master  came  into  the  world  to  redeem 
sinners  from  the  curse  of  sin — and  to  take  care 
that  they  did  that  and  to  provide  that  their  mesr 


80 


THE  MIEAGE  OF  INERRANCY 


sage  should  never  be  lost  from  the  hands  of  God’s 
children  who  needed  that  testimony  to  His  love. 
His  vastest  powers  have  been  none  too  great  for 
the  eternal  God  to  employ. 

In  making  a  Bible  God  made  a  book  which  like 
all  the  rest  of  His  works  is  to  be  praised  for  what 
it  is  and  not  for  what  it  is  not.  Paul  was  a  soul 
so  in  touch  with  God  that  in  this  as  in  countless 
other  things  he  caught  the  divine  mood  entirely. 
Paul,  writing  to  Timothy  his  second  epistle,  in¬ 
cluded  a  definition  of  inspired  Scripture  which  no 
creed  since  has  ever  equalled  for  either  brevity, 
fullness  or  clarity.  And  he  dallied  with  no  such 
negative  and  speculative  claim  as  “  The  Scriptures 
contain  no  mistakes.”  He  struck  for  something 
far  more  positive  and  far  more  vital — something 
which  experience  could  testify  to  with  the  million¬ 
fold  force  of  a  universal  Christian  response: 
“  Every  Scripture  inspired  of  God  is  profitable.” 
Yes,  “  profitable,”  effective  for  the  religious  ends 
it  was  designed  for.  There  is  the  “  impregnable 
rock  ”  for  Bible  faith.  Just  as  Jesus  prescribed 
that  the  life  of  an  individual  disciple  should  be 
judged  by  its  fruits,  so  is  the  Bible  to  be  judged. 
And  its  fruits  are  demonstrative. 

“No  errors  a  man  could  wrestle  with  that 
proposition  for  a  century  and  not  prove  it;  every 
logician  indeed  would  warn  him  beforehand  that 
a  universal  negative  is  unprovable.  But  “  profit¬ 
able  ” — that  he  could  prove  at  every  Christian 
hearthstone,  at  every  Christian  altar.  And  there’s 
the  true  proof  of  inspiration. 


IX 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


THINKING  of  the  Bible  as  a  course  of 
education  prepared  by  the  Father  in 
heaven  for  the  instruction  of  His  chil¬ 
dren  in  the  elder  days  of  the  race,  detracts  nothing 
from  the  permanent  worth  of  the  book,  but  does 
help  to  put  a  right  value  on  certain  passages  often 
considered  difficult  to  interpret.  It  surprises  no 
one  to  find  text-books  for  the  primary  grades  of 
school  differing,  not  only  in  contents  but  in  peda¬ 
gogical  method,  from  text-books  designed  for 
high  school.  If  then  the  Bible  comprises  a  long 
curriculum  from  primary  to  high  school  and  be¬ 
yond,  it  cannot  be  thought  strange  that  differences 
of  quality  and  appeal  distinguish  portions  of  the 
Scriptures  belonging  to  early  stages  of  the  world’s 
culture  from  portions  originating  in  and  designed 
for  later  days  of  more  enlightenment. 

Had  this  natural  and  reasonable  view  of  the 
Bible  prevailed  in  the  Christian  mind  of  recent 
generations,  the  Church  would  never  have  been 
troubled  by  the  imagination  of  a  conflict  between 
Genesis  and  geology.  Nor  would  it  now  be  dis¬ 
turbed  by  assertions  that  evolution  as  one  of  God’s 
working  means  of  production  cannot  be  believed 

81 


82 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


in  without  giving  the  lie  to  what  the  Bible  says 
about  creation.  These  needless  antitheses  have  no 
basis  whatever  except  the  totally  unfounded  no¬ 
tion— the  impossible  notion,  indeed — that  this 
Genesis  prologue  contains  everything  that  is  ever 
to  be  told  or  learned  about  the  beginnings  of  the 
material  universe,  this  present  earth  and  the  race 
of  mankind.  Such  a  presumption  ought  to  be 
contradicted  instantly  by  the  very  scantness  of  the 
story.  Can  three  pages  of  duodecimo  print  be  a 
compendium  of  universal  origins  ?  It  ought  to  be 
still  more  emphatically  contradicted  by  any  ob¬ 
servation  whatever  of  the  divine  training  of  hu¬ 
man  intelligence. 

When,  pray  tell  us,  did  God  ever  make  to  man  a 
gratuitous  present  of  information  which*  man 
could  by  any  pains  search  out  for  himself  ?  When, 
for  that  matter,  did  any  wise  teacher  ever  inform 
a  student  of  what  the  student  could  discover  by 
his  own  investigation?  The  pedagogy  of  earth 
has  in  this  but  learned  the  pedagogy  which  the 
Lord  God  has  observed  ever  since  He  began  to 
teach  Adam  in  the  kindergarten  of  time.  Revela¬ 
tion  He  has  always  reserved  for  those  secrets 
which  are  by  their  nature  beyond  the  inquiries  of 
the  earthly  mind.  A  blatant  skeptic  once  an¬ 
nounced  his  find  of  indisputable  proof  that  Jesus 
could  not  have  been  divine — Jesus  went  away 
from  this  world  without  telling  men  that  they 
ought  to  use  knives  and  forks  at  their  meals.  The 
proof  in  good  common  sense  really  runs  the  other 
way;  if  He  had  not  been  divine,  He  might  have 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


83 


thought  it  His  mission  to  introduce  knives  and 
forks.  Being  divine,  He  was  wise  enough  not  to 
interfere  with  the  slow  processes  by  which  the 
race  was  working  out  its  own  civilization.  That 
was  a  minor  matter  in  which  the  world  could  save 
itself  without  a  heavenly  intervention.  Christ 
rendered  His  service  on  a  plane  that  men  could 
never  reach  without  Him. 

The  same  economy  and  reserve  are  in  Genesis. 
Most  knowledge  could  wait  till  the  human  mind 
grew  out  of  babyhood.  All  the  age-long  story  in 
the  rocks  and  all  the  cosmic  panorama  in  the  stars 
would  at  length  come  out;  men  would  learn  to 
read  and  to  discern  and  in  good  time  would  know 
the  marvellous  truth  of  science,  both  geologic  and 
astronomic.  Indeed,  in  the  primitive  epoch  of  the 
Pentateuch  how  futile  it  would  have  been  to  de¬ 
velop  the  complete  facts  of  creation  for  a  tribe  of 
just  liberated  slaves  to  read  and  use.  What  could 
the  hordes  gathered  before  Sinai  have  made  out 
of  a  treatise  on  the  flora  of  the  carboniferous  age 
or  a  discussion  of  the  history  of  spiral  nebulae? 
Were  the  earliest  portions  of  the  Bible  of  a  na¬ 
ture  like  that,  it  would  scarcely  be  effrontery  to 
say  that  God  could  never  have  had  anything  to  do 
with  such  ridiculously  displaced  literature.  Moth¬ 
ers  know  enough  to  tell  their  small  children  child 
stories;  God,  with  an  untutored  child  race  to  in¬ 
struct,  would  surely  be  as  wise. 

And  so  indeed  He  was.  He  put  into  Genesis  a 
child  story  of  creation — a  story  told  in  pictures 
and  symbols  such  as  children  love.  But  it  was  a 


84 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


true  story — so  true  that  to  this  day,  when  science 
has  fashioned  around  it  a  sumptuous  setting  of 
golden  knowledge,  rich,  varied,  vast,  this  same 
brief  story  shines  still  like  a  jewel  in  the  midst  of 
all  later  discovery,  glowingly  lovelier  than  the  staid 
prosings  of  the  investigators,  brilliant  with  the 
simple  poetry  of  God’s  pleasure  in  His  own  well 
wrought  handiwork.  And  it  tells  of  the  universe 
all  that  man  needed  morally  to  know  before  he 
had  learned  enough  to  be  his  own  explorer  into 
the  Creator’s  mysteries. 

It  tells  the  answer  to  the  great  first  question  of 
the  opening  mind  of  humanity:  Who  made  all 
this?  It  tells  too  the  guarantee  of  the  Infinite  to 
the  first  terrifying  skepticism  that  comes  to  plague 
that  opening  mind;  no  matter  what  the  cynical 
look  of  things  may  be,  “  God  saw  everything  that 
he  had  made  and,  behold,  it  was  very  good.” 
Out  of  Genesis  its  peasant  readers  even  learned 
something  of  that  divine  combination  of  power 
and  patience  which  is  yet  the  wonder  of  those  who 
seek  to  know  the  ways  of  the  Lord- — able  with  His 
power  to  accomplish  all  at  a  word,  yet  willing  to 
build  up  His  creation  by  the  patient  addition  of 
one  to  one,  even  as  a  schoolboy  adds  up  a  tedious 
sum. 

The  Genesis  manuscript  alone  was  therefore 
enough  to  let  a  man  know  that  he  was  in  God’s 
world  and  that  he  himself  bore  marks  of  relation¬ 
ship  to  God  that  set  him  apart  from  all  living 
creatures  by  whom  he  found  himself  surrounded. 
That  was  not  sufficient  to  make  him  a  scientist 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


85 


but  it  amply  sufficed  to  make  him  a  worshipper — 
which  in  this  Bible  introduction  was  certainly  the 
guiding  object  of  inspiration.  And  the  wonder  of 
Genesis — the  sheer,  open  fact  which  a  denier  of 
inspiration  may  struggle  long  to  account  for  in 
any  way  consistent  with  his  denial — is  that  these 
primeval  chapters,  innocent  of  even  a  suspicion  of 
modern  science,  to-day  commingle  freely  with  all 
which  that  science  has  taught  about  the  constitu¬ 
tion  of  man  and  the  universe  and  lose  no  dignity 
nor  suffer  any  stultification  in  the  contact. 

A  cosmology  now  holds  sway  over  men’s 
thought  totally  different  from  that  which  pre¬ 
vailed  when  Genesis  was  put  into  the  Bible ;  a  new 
survey  of  creation  has  substituted  uncounted  mil¬ 
lions  of  years  for  this  story’s  naive  six  days;  all 
things  have  been  reclassified  and  realigned  in  the 
natural  world;  and  yet  in  the  simplicity  of  a  great 
insight  the  Mosaic  account  of  creation  stands  up  to 
command  the  assent  of  mankind  to  its  two  pin¬ 
nacle  affirmations:  “  In  the  beginning  God  created 
the  heavens  and  the  earth,”  and  at  the  end  of  the 
work  for  the  crown  of  the  labour  He  “  created 
man  in  his  own  image  ”  and  “  breathed  into  his 
nostrils  the  breath  of  life  and  man  became  a  liv¬ 
ing  soul.”  Some  science  may  indeed  doubt  that, 
but  the  world  believes  it.  And  naught  but  divine 
inspiration  could  triumph  over  the  changes  of  cen¬ 
turies  like  that.  God  taught  His  earliest  children 
truth,  and  truth  it  still  abides. 

The  vindication  of  the  third  chapter  of  Genesis 
—the  story  of  man’s  fall — is  equally  triumphant. 


86 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


The  only  pity  is  that  some  of  the  Bible’s  stanchest 
champions  are  unaware  of  the  victory  and  con¬ 
sider  that  there  was  a  great  defeat  suffered  when 
the  ancient  account  of  the  fall  of  man  met  the 
latter-day  conception  of  social  as  well  as  organic 
evolution.  To  admit  this,  however,  is  naturalizing 
in  the  Church  an  ignorance  of  moral  philosophy 
which  may  possibly  be  excusable  among  scientists 
but  is  certainly  not  befitting  to  theologians.  It  is 
said  that  evolution  makes  it  foolishness  to  talk  of 
the  fall  of  man.  On  the  contrary  evolution  may 
be  fairly  said  to  confirm  the  fall  of  man.  The 
only  thing  that  may  have  been  invalidated  by  the 
impact  of  evolution  on  the  Bible  at  this  point  is 
the  name  which  the  Church  has  given  to  the 
tragedy  of  Adam’s  sin — the  “  fall.”  And  that’s 
no  loss,  for  the  Bible  never  uses  any  such  term 
about  the  transgression  in  Eden,  and  the  Church 
would  better  forget  it. 

Wherever  the  two  creation  chapters  of  Genesis 
made  any  man  realize  his  obligation  to  God  as 
Creator  and  Preserver,  the  next  question  inevi¬ 
table  must  have  been  why  it  was  so  hard  to  live 
up  to  that  obligation.  Why  was  a  man  always 
sinning?  There  arose  another  problem  that  man 
could  never  work  out  for  himself.  So  the  inspir¬ 
ing  Spirit  prepared  the  third  chapter  to  give  an¬ 
swer — a  primary  answer  indeed  but  an  everlasting 
one — to  that  question.  By  a  tale  so  real  to  the 
experience  of  humanity  that  its  incidents  might 
have  been  duplicated  a  thousand  times  in  the  sub¬ 
stance  of  the  situation,  it  was  shown  that  God 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


87 


leaves  it  to  man  to  make  his  own  decision  whether 
in  this  world  he  will  obey  or  rebel.  Until  man 
realizes,  however,  that  this  is  a  choice  for  him  to 
make,  he  is  not  a  moral  creature;  in  the  graphic 
language  of  this  record,  he  knows  neither  good 
nor  evil. 

Evolution  agrees  thoroughly  that  from  such  in¬ 
fantile  innocency — the  irresponsibility  of  the 
morally  neutral  animal — man  somewhere  passed 
into  the  morally  responsible  realm  where  con¬ 
science  distinguishes  the  right  from  the  wrong  and 
affirms  the  duty  to  do  right.  It  cannot  guess, 
though,  where  that  momentous  change  occurred 
or  how.  Genesis  tells.  God  laid  on  humanity  a 
test  to  see  if  humanity  would  take  life  or  death 
— obedience  necessarily  being  life  when  the  com¬ 
mands  to  be  obeyed  were  the  laws  of  the  Ruler 
of  the  universe.  But  the  tragedy  was  that  hu¬ 
manity  chose  death — to  wit,  disobedience.  That 
was  the  “  fall.”  Yet  even  then  man  was  at  the 
door  of  a  greater  life — beginning  an  evolution  to 
better  things.  God  said  so  then  and  there.  That 
“  serpent  ”  of  sin  that  had  wrought  all  the  evil 
of  this  terrible  drama  was  yet  to  be  crushed  by  the 
struggling  descendants  of  erring  Eve — especially 
by  One  destined  to  be  stronger  at  the  last  than  the 
“  strong  man  ”  of  wickedness. 

The  ancient  sinner  who  read  that  chapter  un¬ 
doubtedly  learned  from  it  what  sin  was.  He 
learned  why  its  hold  on  his  heart  gripped  so  un- 
shakably.  But  far  better,  he  understood  that  it 
was  worth  his  while  to  fight  for  freedom  because 


88 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


God  had  foretold  the  destruction  of  the  power  of 
sin.  Could  human  genius  without  a  divine 
prompting  have  written  so  divinely  adequate  a 
word  for  just  that  page  of  immortal  counsel  at 
just  that  crisis  in  the  spiritual  education  of  man¬ 
kind?  No;  it  would  be  little  risk  to  stake  the 
whole  case  for  the  reality  of  Bible  inspiration  on 
that  Eden  story — provided  always,  however,  that 
the  spiritual  light  shining  from  it  is  what  is 
thought  of,  and  that  contentious  dispute  whether 
the  story  is  to  be  called  history  or  allegory  is  rec¬ 
ognized  as  unbecoming  among  those  who  alike  at¬ 
tribute  its  conception  to  God.  The  narrative  may 
in  reality  be  either  the  one  or  the  other  without 
the  need  of  deciding  which— the  important  thing 
is  that  it  is  certainly  the  truth. 

The  difficulty  felt  by  so  many  modem  Christians 
in  accepting  allegory  as  an  inspired  vehicle  of 
God’s  truth  is  strictly  an  occidental  difficulty.  No 
oriental  would  feel  it.  It  is  a  hindrance  imposed 
on  faith  by  the  unimaginative  matter-of-factness 
that  is  more  or  less  a  characteristic  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  mind  everywhere  and  especially  of  that 
strain  in  Anglo-Saxondom  which  draws  inherit¬ 
ance  from  the  rigid  and  literal  Puritans.  To  them 
the  exercise  of  mental  invention  to  create  a  tale 
of  what  never  happened  on  sea  or  land  was  a  will¬ 
ful  excursion  into  the  realm  of  that  evil  one  who 
was  a  liar  from  the  beginning.  Of  course,  they 
could  not  dream  of  such  piece  of  wicked  imperti¬ 
nence  existing  within  the  covers  of  the  Bible. 

But  happily  in  regard  to  secular  literature  even 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


89 


the  strictest  of  Puritans  in  our  day  appreciate  the 
possibility  that  fiction,  produced  by  an  artist  capa¬ 
ble  of  broadly  depicting  living  human  types  in 
the  actors  of  his  plot,  may  draw  a  picture  really 
more  true  to  life  than  any  isolated  “  fact  story  ” 
of  a  few  real  individuals.  Fiction  can  mass  its 
characters  under  the  author’s  generalship  for  a  far 
more  telling  effect.  And  as  for  the  realism  of  the 
result,  there  are  the  soundest  reasons  for  saying 
that  a  student  will  learn  more  of  the  actual  life  of 
England  in  the  time  of  Richard  the  Lion-Heart 
from  the  imaginative  story  of  “  Ivanhoe  ”  than 
from  any  extant  history  of  that  period. 

Moreover,  it  is  by  no  means  unusual  for  fictional 
stories  to  bring  about  irresistible  moral  arouse- 
ment  among  a  people  who  have  woefully  long 
dallied  with  public  evils.  Did  not  Dickens’s 
“  Oliver  Twist  ”  count  powerfully  to  ameliorate 
the  horrors  of  English  workhouses;  his  “Nicho¬ 
las  Nickleby  ”  to  improve  the  treatment  of  Eng¬ 
lish  schoolboys?  And  would  anybody  deny  that 
Harriet  Beecher  Stowe’s  “  Uncle  Tom’s  Cabin  ” 
was  a  mighty  agency  toward  the  emancipation  of 
American  slaves  ?  Is  it  possible  then  for  the 
Christian,  who  must  believe  that  the  good  works 
of  the  world  are  never  wrought  in  the  absence  of 
God,  to  reject  the  art  of  fiction  as  an  unworthy 
instrument  for  God  to  employ  in  the  hands  of  an 
author  who  has  “  let  his  soul  for  truth’s  sake  go 
abroad  ”  ?  And  from  that  standpoint  what  hin¬ 
drance  can  forbid  him  to  step  over  to  the  scarcely 
more  venturesome  thought  that  God  might  (did 


90 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


He  but  choose)  inspire  works  of  fiction  for  His 
great  standard  volume  of  world  religion? 

The  suggestion  that  the  books  named  for  Daniel 
and  Jonah  are  not  perhaps  historical  has  awakened 
embittered  commotion  at  various  times  in  the 
Church  of  Christ  because  the  considerations  just 
proposed  have  not  been  common  to  the  thought  of 
contemporary  Christians.  The  dry  and  flat  for¬ 
mula,  ‘‘The  Bible  is  truth ;  anything  else  than  literal 
history  is  a  lie;  therefore  there  can  be  nothing  but 
literal  history  in  the  Bible/’  has  been  too  hastily 
clamped  down  on  the  discussion.  There  is  more 
than  that  to  say.  The  alternative  to  strict  history 
is  not  a  “  pack  of  lies  ”  but  honest  historical  fiction 
— a  form  of  the  highest  literary  honour  to-day 
and  a  type  of  writing  esteemed  in  nearly  all  ages 
for  the  lofty  genius  required  to  lift  it  to  success. 

If  a  prophet  of  Israel,  at  some  time  later  than 
the  epoch  at  which  Jonah  or  Daniel  flourished, 
was  persuaded  that  he  could  write  for  his  people 
a  message  associated  with  the  famous  name  of  one 
or  the  other  of  these  men,  which  by  reason  of  that 
association  would  attract  a  larger  reading,  is  there 
anybody  who  will  maintain  that  it  was  a  wicked 
and  deceitful  intent?  None  certainly  of  that  time 
who  read  the  message  would  be  deceived  by  it ;  its 
fictional  character  would  be  understood  as  readily 
as  Americans  understand  that  “  Hugh  Wynne, 
Free  Quaker/’  for  example,  is  not  a  historical 
memoir  of  George  Washington.  But  the  great 
name  of  a  remembered  hero  would  give  an  appeal 
to  the  book  and  more  would  read,  heed  and  medi- 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


91 


tate.  And  the  vividness  of  romance  then  as  to¬ 
day  would  intensify  the  impression  conveyed. 

Then  “  who  hath  known  the  mind  of  the  Lord 
that  he  should  instruct  him  ”  that  historical  novels, 
no  matter  how  full  of  the  great  and  abiding  ideas 
of  religion,  must  never  be  admitted  to  the  canon  of 
Scriptures?  Who  presents  himself  so  to  inform 
the  Bible’s  infinite  Compiler?  There  are  crystal- 
clear  spiritual  elements  in  both  Jonah  and  Daniel 
which,  as  well  as  human  judgment  may  guess,  a 
book  of  divine  things  could  not  omit  without  loss. 
There  is  Jonah’s  moving  exposition  of  God’s  uni¬ 
versal  love — remarkable  precursor  of  the  supreme 
note  of  the  Christian  Gospel.  Daniel  too  has  ideals 
of  fidelity  to  conscience  which  expand  the  con¬ 
scientious  soul  with  the  most  heroic  motives, 
whether  those  ideals  are  drawn  from  the  great 
mind  that  penned  the  book  or  from  great  charac¬ 
ters  there  commemorated  who  suffered  heroically 
in  the  flesh.  God  needed  both  those  writings. 
Should  a  question  of  mere  literary  form  rule  them 
out? 

To  say  these  things  is  not  to  make  argument 
either  for  or  against  the  historicity  of  the  two 
productions  thus  named.  It  is  an  argument  that 
if  they  were  fictional,  they  would  still  have  just  as 
good  title  to  the  rating  of  inspired  documents. 
And  it  may  be  added  that  not  their  miracles  but 
their  failure  to  fit  into  any  known  historical  situ¬ 
ation  is  the  obstacle  which  prevents  so  many  Bible 
students  from  classifying  them  with  history.  The 
highest  living  authority  who  holds  to  Daniel  as  a 


92 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


historical  record  seems  to  admit  that  such  a  posi¬ 
tion  can  be  preserved  for  it  only  by  supposing 
that  the  Darius  who  cast  Daniel  into  the  lions’  den 
was  a  local  proconsul  ruling  temporarily  in  behalf 
of  the  conquering  Cyrus  over  the  city  and  district 
of  Babylon  alone.  Yet  the  lordly  manner  in  which 
Darius  at  the  end  of  the  chapter  wrote  to  “  all  the 
peoples,  nations  and  languages  that  dwell  in  all  the 
earth  ”  sounds  very  little  as  if  he  were  aware  of 
having  the  mighty  Cyrus  or  any  other  potentate 
as  overlord. 

Happily,  however,  there  is  one  point  where  oc¬ 
cidental  and  oriental  believers  are  able  to  join  in 
equal  recognition  of  the  use  of  symbolic  fiction  in 
the  Bible.  That  luminous  meeting  ground  is  the 
parables  of  Jesus.  There  may  have  been  a  time 
when  certain  Bible-readers  concerned  themselves 
to  speculate  where  and  when  the  prodigal  son  and 
his  father  lived  and  to  what  far  country  the  former 
wandered  away.  But  that  is  long  past  now.  It 
satisfies  all  of  us,  conservatives  and  liberals,  that 
these  forever  memorable  figures  lived  in  the  pic¬ 
turesque  mind  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  from  thence 
they  issued  into  an  undying  reality — more  actual 
to-day  in  the  immortality  of  their  story  setting 
than  all  the  princes  and  emperors  who  ever  reigned 
on  the  thrones  of  all  the  world.  There  may  or 
there  may  not  have  been  a  man  in  history  who  sold 
all  that  he  had  in  order  to  buy  a  pearl  of  great 
price.  But  there  is  such  a  man  now ;  he  has  lived 
from  the  day  that  Jesus  Christ  named  him.  If 
any  man  says  that  a  piece  of  imagination  can  never 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


93 


be  inspired  enough  for  a  place  in  the  Bible,  the 
mere  mention  of  the  parables  of  Jesus  is  all  the 
answer  needful. 

Then  there  is  another  realm  of  symbolism  in  the 
Scriptures  which  all  schools  of  Bible  students 
would  be  equally  loath  to  deny.  Surely  there  are 
none  to  maintain  that  the  Bible’s  descriptions  of 
the  architecture  and  occupations  of  heaven  are 
literal  forecasts  of  the  joys  which  await  the  re¬ 
deemed  in  the  immortal  life.  How  poor  would  be 
a  heavenly  city  which  could  be  described  in  guide¬ 
book  fashion  within  the  compass  of  an  earth-born 
and  earth-bound  language.  All  our  tongues  are 
weighted  down  with  leaden  words  that  have  all 
been  necessarily  cast  in  physical  moulds.  For 
things  that  exist  in  spiritual  actuality  independent 
of  the  familiar  forms  of  matter  we  have  slight 
imagination  and  no  vocabulary.  God’s  book  can¬ 
not  tell  us  more  than  our  pens  and  tongues  can 
say.  He  speaks  perforce  of  golden  streets  and 
jewelled  walls  and  rivers  of  the  water  of  life. 
There  are  no  exacter  words.  But  we  shall  none 
of  us  feel  cheated  if  we  find  none  of  these  things 
when  God  brings  us  to  that  “  place  of  his  abode.” 
If  the  gold  and  precious  stones  are  not  there,  it 
will  be  plain  to  us  that  they  served  on  earth  well 
and  truthfully  as  symbols  of  glories  far  beyond 
our  fleshly  ken.  And  we  shall  be  thankful  to  God 
that  He  did  put  symbols  into  His  book. 

Meanwhile,  here  in  the  present  life,  let  us  try 
to  do  the  Bible  the  constant  justice  of  remember¬ 
ing  the  picturesqueness  of  the  oriental  mind,  and 


94 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


determinedly  resist  our  tendency  to  interpret  the 
book — wholly  of  oriental  origin — as  if  it  had  been 
produced  by  Americans  in  our  own  pragmatic  and 
factual  age.  Were  it  not  so  solemn  a  folly  per¬ 
petrated  in  premises  of  such  profound  seriousness, 
it  would  be  grotesque  to  see  the  Yankee  all-busi¬ 
ness  intellect  analyzing  the  delicate  dream-fabrics 
of  eastern  imagery  with  the  same  literalness  that  it 
handles  a  column  of  market  reports.  No  doubt 
there  have  at  times  risen  even  in  the  west  poetizers 
who,  if  allowed  to  go  on  unhindered,  would  have 
dissipated  the  meat  of  the  Lord  Christ’s  teachings 
into  an  ethereal  ambrosia  quite  useless  for  “  human 
nature’s  daily  food.”  And,  of  course,  we  cannot 
endure  to  have  Christ  vapourized  into  misty  fancy. 
But  far  oftener  the  mischief  has  been  done  in  quite 
the  opposite  way  when  ideals  that  were  meant  to 
lift  souls  into  the  pure  air  of  high  heaven  have 
been  chained  down  to  pace  the  earth  by  a  profitless 
and  deceiving  road  of  unimaginative  ritual. 

This  is  what  in  the  worship  of  a  large  part  of 
the  Church  has  totally  ruined  the  great  spiritual 
significance  of  those  two  wonderful  metaphors, 
“  This  is  my  body  ”  and  “  This  is  my  blood,”  and 
in  the  practical  Christian  life  has  reduced  to  an 
idle,  prating  folly  the  Lord’s  canny  and  pungent 
proverb:  “Give  to  every  one  who  asketh  thee.” 
It  is  a  sorry  blunder,  of  course,  to  turn  a  literal 
word  of  Scripture  into  a  figure  of  speech.  But  it 
is  a  blunder  equally  ill  and  much  more  frequent  to 
take  a  proverb,  an  epigram,  a  symbol,  a  picture 
phrase,  a  sparkling  adventure  in  poetic  fancy,  and 


EDUCATION  AND  SYMBOLISM 


95 


treat  it  like  a  formula  in  geometry  or  a  paragraph 
of  directions  from  a  mail  order  catalogue.  Before 
an  occidental  reads  this  oriental  book,  he  ought  to 
offer  a  specially  humble  and  fervent  prayer  for  the 
resurrection  and  sanctifying  of  all  the  poetic  im¬ 
agination  latent  in  him.  And  especially  should  he 
beware,  if  he  does  not  find  the  petition 
abundantly  answered  as  he  traverses  prior  parts 
of  Scripture,  of  invading  the  book  of  the  Revela¬ 
tion.  Only  a  poet  is  fit  to  read  the  Bible’s  final 
writing. 


X 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE 


THE  demand  for  an  inerrant  Bible,  as  we 
have  said,  is  an  artificial  stipulation  which 
men  would  impose  on  the  Spirit  who  has 
inspired  the  Scriptures  but  which  gets  no  recogni¬ 
tion  whatever  within  the  Scriptures  themselves. 
The  Bible  is  nowhere  a  self-conscious  book,  and 
only  once  does  there  come  to  the  surface  anything 
which  can  be  deemed  an  inspired  definition  of  in¬ 
spiration — the  verses  2  Timothy  3:  16,  17,  which 
on  an  earlier  page  have  already  been  referred  to: 
“  Every  Scripture  inspired  of  God  is  also  profitable 
for  teaching,  for  reproof,  for  correction,  for  in¬ 
struction  which  is  in  righteousness,  that  the  man 
of  God  may  be  complete,  furnished  completely 
unto  every  good  work.” 

It  is  indeed  sometimes  alleged  that  this  wording 
of  this  passage — the  translation  of  the  American 
revisers-— has  been  weakened  from  the  strong  sense 
of  the  King  James  version;  some  have  even  said 
that  it  was  purposely  weakened.  The  accusation 
is  idle,  because  the  language  of  the  revision  is  just 
as  inclusive  and  emphatic  as  the  terms  of  the  old 
version.  Nevertheless,  in  order  that  the  full  force 
of  the  earlier  rendering  may  be  before  the  eyes  of 

96 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE  97 


those  who  prefer  it,  let  that  also  be  repeated:  “  All 
Scripture  is  given  by  inspiration  of  God  and  is 
profitable  for  doctrine,  for  reproof,  for  correction, 
for  instruction  in  righteousness,  that  the  man  of 
God  may  be  perfect,  thoroughly  furnished  unto  all 
good  works.” 

Here  then  is  the  Bible's  standard  description  of 
its  own  qualities,  and  here  surely,  if  from  the 
Bible  viewpoint  a  preternatural  exactness  was  es¬ 
sential  to  inspired  literature,  there  would  have 
been  some  tangible  hint  of  that  characteristic.  In¬ 
stead  the  outlook  of  the  apostle — himself  an  un¬ 
doubted  agent  of  divine  inspiration — was  entirely 
in  another  direction.  Paul  had  his  eyes  on  the 
moral  dynamic  of  the  book — its  spiritual  vitality. 
That  dynamic  he  had  himself  felt  in  the  deepest 
impulses  of  his  own  ministry.  He  had  seen  its 
efficiency  demonstrated  by  the  consecration  and 
holiness  of  many  fellow  Christians  who  loved  the 
book  and  lived  by  it.  On  both  accounts  he  was  so 
convinced  of  the  divine  power  flowing  out  from 
the  Holy  Scriptures  that  he  felt  no  need  to  seek 
other  grounds  for  commending  it  to  the  confidence 
of  men.  Had  some  one  suggested  to  him  that  the 
written  word  of  God  might  be  further  attested  by 
asserting  that,  even  in  its  secular  allusions,  it  was 
clear  from  the  ordinary  misunderstandings  and 
blunders  of  humanity,  he  would  have  been  scarcely 
interested  even  if  he  had  believed  the  claim  to  be 
correct.  He  knew  so  many  other  things  about  the 
Bible  infinitely  more  significant. 

How  then  does  it  come  that  Protestantism  at 


98  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE 


large  has  laid  so  tremendous  a  weight  on  merely 
verbal  and  factual  inerrancy  in  the  Bible?  Why 
does  a  dogma  that  is  invisible  in  the  Bible  itself 
bulk  so  large  in  the  orthodox  defense  of  the  Bible? 
The  explanation  is  to  be  found  in  religious  anxi¬ 
eties  which  the  Protestant  mind  shares  with  the 
Roman  Catholic  mind  but  which  it  seeks  to  in¬ 
trench  in  a  much  different  refuge.  The  instinct 
of  each — probably  it  would  not  be  too  much  to 
say,  the  universal  instinct  of  men — is  for  certainty 
in  religion.  On  so  measureless  and  so  profound 
an  interest  people  feel  they  cannot  afford  to  en¬ 
dure  the  least  doubtful  hazard;  they  must  know. 
The  proverb  which  bids  men  be  sure  they  are  right 
before  they  go  ahead,  is  not  sufficient  for  this  case ; 
in  living  life,  a  man  has  to  go  ahead  whether  he  is 
ready  or  not ;  he  cannot  wait  until  he  has  reasoned 
through  the  case.  Therefore  if  religion  has  any 
help  for  him  at  all,  he  expects  it  to  speak  at  once 
and  decisively.  He  will  be  content  with  nothing 
misty  and  fluctuating;  he  wants  positive  and  un¬ 
disputed  surety. 

The  Roman  believer  is  persuaded  that  he  has 
just  this  certainty  to  answer  all  his  questions. 
What  the  priest  says,  repeating  what  the  pope  says, 
is  his  reliance;  pope  and  priest  claim  to  know  the 
exact  truth  about  religion,  and  whatever  they  may 
tell  him  he  receives  as  the  end  of  all  controversy — 
the  supreme  decision  which  forbids  further  query. 
It  is  an  easy  disposal  of  doubt’s  inveterate  uneasi¬ 
ness.  Yet  the  Protestant  Christian  rightly  feels 
all  this  an  incredible  supposition — tha t  perfect 


I 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  EOCTKINE  99 

knowledge  of  every  Christian  doctrine  should  be 
given  solely  to  one  old  man  shut  away  in  the  palace 
prison  of  the  Vatican,  and  that  the  reading  and 
thinking  and  praying  of  all  other  good  men  in  all 
the  world  should  count  for  nothing  at  all  in  com¬ 
parison  or  contrast  with  the  pope’s  ipse  dixit.  It 
is  quite  too  much  for  a  free  soul  to  accept.  Still 
the  Protestant  too  wants  that  same  kind  of  cer¬ 
tainty.  Where  shall  he  find  it?  Away  from  the 
pope  and  from  all  other  seers  and  preachers  and 
saints  as  well — from  every  and  any  voice  of  man 
— he  turns  to  the  unchanging  record  and  testi¬ 
mony  of  the  Bible.  “  Here  is  God’s  word,”  he 
says ;  “  I  rest  here.” 

It  is  the  best  of  all  resting  places  undoubtedly. 
We  have  already  borne  witness  to  the  faith  that 
no  living  soul  who  truly  relies  on  Holy  Scripture 
as  his  “  man  of  counsel  ”  will  fail  to  please  God 
or  miss  meeting  the  Saviour.  But  it  is  another 
question  entirely  whether  the  desire  of  the 
heavenly  Father  is,  by  means  of  either  pope  or 
Bible,  to  eliminate  diversities  of  faith  from  among 
His  disciples — to  bring  them  all  into  one  uniform 
line  of  thinking,  one  single  consensus  of  theology. 

To  say  as  much  as  this  will,  of  course,  seem  to 
many  like  denying  an  axiom  of  mathematics.  It 
is  quite  as  likely  to  be  a  Protestant  as  a  Catholic 
who  will  argue :  “  It  stands  to  reason  that  there 
is  only  one  truth  about  any  subject.  Whatever 
opinion  men  may  have  on  that  subject  which  does 
not  coincide  with  that  one  truth  must  necessarily 
be  a  wrong  opinion.  And  on  such  an  important 


100  THE  MULTIPLEXITT  OF  DOCTRINE 


matter  as  the  truth  about  himself  and  the  human 
soul  it  is  certain  that  God  would  not  leave  any¬ 
body  to  error.  We  simply  must  believe  that  some¬ 
where  He  has  made  it  possible  for  us  to  find  and 
know  the  absolute  unmistaken  facts  of  religion.” 
All  this  may  be  heard  said  as  emphatically  in 
evangelical  as  in  papal  circles,  with  only  a  final 
difference  about  where  that  indubitable  truth  is  to 
be  found — in  the  book  or  in  the  Church. 

But  again  it  must  be  observed  that  the  adequate 
conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  is  not  quite  so  sim¬ 
ple  as  everyday  home-made  logic  would  induce  us 
to  believe.  An  open-and-shut  antithesis  between 
right  opinion  and  wrong  opinion  may  cover  the 
ground  for  a  question  of  scientific  fact  (though 
not  always  even  there),  but  a  question  of  the 
eternal  things  which  fill  earth  and  sky  and  all  the 
life  of  man  may  not  be  so  easily  measured.  It 
would  be  a  bold  proposition  indeed  to  maintain 
that  any  thought  which  comes  within  the  yea-and- 
nay  of  one  human  brain  is  the  whole  unabridged 
truth  about  any  act  of  God  or  any  responsibility 
of  man.  The  character  and  being  of  God  and  the 
salvation  of  humankind  are  still  vaster  themes; 
on  these  a  fully  balanced  understanding  is  even 
less  likely  to  be  achieved  inside  any  single  mind 
in  this  world. 

In  another  chapter  we  have  studied  how  the  di¬ 
vine  Editor  in  the  Bible  secured  a  comprehensive 
presentation  of  various  elements  of  Christian  faith 
by  collating  a  variety  of  views  from  different  au¬ 
thors,  and  so  in  a  doctrinal  symposium,  as  it  were, 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OP  DOCTRINE  101 


drawing  a  large  circle  to  include  each  wide  and 
expansive  principle  of  life.  By  the  same  token  it 
often  requires  numerous  minds  vibrating  in  a  long 
gamut  of  opinions  to  sound  out  to  the  world  the 
full  chords  of  God’s  entire  truth.  The  loftiest 
note  and  the  lowest  in  such  an  instance  may  seem 
distressingly  out  of  harmony;  dogmatists  may 
proclaim  them  in  hopeless  contradiction — and  yet 
in  the  swelling  symphony  of  God’s  messages  each 
may  be  equally  needful  for  the  divinest  music. 
Truth  is  less  often  this  or  that  than  this  and  that. 

If  one  will  but  consider  the  basic  obligation  of 
the  loyal  Christian  disciple  to  take  the  Bible  as  it 
is  for  what  it  is,  he  will  certainly  be  constrained 
to  yield  assent  to  this  proposition  of  a  multifarious 
theology  which  God  purposes  to  convey  through 
a  multifarious  Bible.  The  opposite  conception  of 
one  single-strand  line  of  doctrine,  drawn  unde¬ 
flected  and  unduplicated  from  the  beginning  of  the 
Old  Testament  to  the  end  of  the  New,  from  which 
only  willfulness  or  blindness  can  occasion  depar¬ 
ture — from  which  any  departure  whatsoever  is 
necessarily  a  crazy  plunge  into  mental  confusion 
and  moral  rebellion — will  simply  not  stand  up  in 
the  presence  of  any  honest  study  of  the  book  that 
God  actually  made. 

In  fact,  the  dogmatist  who  says  that  the  Bible 
was  intended  to  teach  just  the  creedal  system 
which  his  predilections  have  derived  from  it  and 
extinguish  every  other  mode  of  thought,  is  verging 
dangerously  close  to  a  sacrilege — for  he  is  in  ef¬ 
fect  saying  that  the  Lord  attempted  something 


102  THE  MULTIPLEXXTY  OP  DOCTBINE 


which  He  obviously  did  not  succeed  in  accomplish¬ 
ing.  Is  not  that  an  impiety?  Certainly  other 
modes  of  thought  are  not  extinguished.  They 
multiply  among  the  Bible’s  most  devoted  readers. 
If  an  all-prevailing  uniformity  of  belief  in  the 
Church  were  the  object  in  view  when  the  Scrip¬ 
tures  were  brought  into  being,  it  surely  could  not 
have  been  beyond  the  divine  capacity  to  produce 
a  book  immensely  better  suited  to  that  end.  For 
that  result  the  Bible  should  have  been  much  less 
various,  much  more  systematic,  much  more  logical, 
much  more  rigid.  To  multiply  a  single  pattern 
anywhere,  one  must  see  to  having  an  inflexible 
mould. 

Is  not  then  the  reverential  attitude  that  which 
says  that  since  God  did  not  by  the  Scriptures  sup¬ 
press  differences  in  the  religious  beliefs  of  Bible 
students,  He  must  be  supposed  to  favour  rather 
than  deprecate  those  diversities?  If  He  wanted 
an  unvarying  creed  and  an  undiversified  polity 
throughout  His  Church,  there  is  certainly  enough 
loyalty  abroad  among  His  people  to  secure  what 
the  Master  wants.  Inasmuch  then  as  a  perfect 
sameness  is  not  secured,  even  where  men  heartily 
agree  to  take  the  Bible  in  its  unsophisticated  sim¬ 
plicity  as  the  only  criterion  for  either  creed  or 
polity,  it  can  only  be  inferred  as  a  practical  judg¬ 
ment  on  the  situation  that  the  Lord  of  the  Church 
is  not  interested  in  sameness.  Plenty  of  proof  is 
evident  that  the  Creator  loves  variety  in  nature; 
why  not  in  faith  and  love  and  worship  and  spir¬ 
itual  experience? 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE  103 


There  are  those  who  are  very  sure  that  the  Fa¬ 
ther  above  is  not  satisfied  to  have  His  household 
on  earth  ruled  over  by  any  arrangement  which 
does  not  include  a  hierarchy  of  bishops.  On  the 
other  hand,  there  are  a  multitude  of  no  doubt 
equally  good  and  faithful  souls  who  are  fully  per¬ 
suaded  that  bishops  are  an  abomination  to  the 
Lord  and  it  is  a  defeat  of  some  eternal  good  pur¬ 
pose  in  the  universe  if  anybody  rises  higher  in 
authority  within  the  Church  than  the  presbyters. 
And  both  these  parties  in  all  sincerity  appeal  to  the 
same  Scriptures  to  sustain  their  mutually  exclusive 
claims.  Each  side  is  amazed  that  the  other  should 
think  the  Bible  can  be  interpreted  to  such  incredi¬ 
ble  conclusions.  In  the  doctrinal  field,  similarly. 
Baptists  and  Disciples  insist  that  nothing  is  plainer 
than  that  the  New  Testament  prescribes  immersion 
as  the  only  form  by  which  baptism  can  be  baptism. 
Practically  all  others  of  the  greater  Protestant  de¬ 
nominations  hold  that  nothing  can  be  plainer  in 
the  records  than  the  fact  that  no  form  was  pre¬ 
scribed  for  the  rite  and  several  different  forms 
were  used  in  apostolic  times  as  circumstances 
might  happen  to  make  most  convenient. 

These  disputations  look  tragic  except  in  the  light 
which  makes  their  ponderous  earnestness  absurd 
— the  realization  that  the  God  who  planned  and 
brought  together  the  contents  of  the  Bible  cannot 
possibly  have  cared  much  about  either  of  these 
fiercely  debated  issues  or  He  would  have  taken 
effective  pains  to  settle  them  long  ago  before  they 
began.  Does  any  Episcopalian  really  believe  that 


104  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE 


the  Infinite  One,  if  in  fact  He  considered  it  re¬ 
quisite  for  His  Church  on  earth  to  be  forever  and 
only  under  the  governance  of  lord  bishops,  would 
not  have  been  able  to  say  so  in  terms  that  not  even 
obstinate  Presbyterians  could  dare  to  gainsay? 
Or  if  in  truth  no  disciple  of  the  Master  might  be 
considered  to  be  baptized  unless  he  had  been  cov¬ 
ered  head  and  foot  with  water,  and  every  disciple 
must  needs  be  so  baptized,  would  not  Jesus  have 
spoken  the  few  words  required  to  make  the  matter 
plain  even  to  men  who  do  not  possess  Greek  lexi¬ 
cons  and  are  unable  to  consult  the  alleged  “  schol¬ 
arship  of  the  world  ”  ? 

The  most  outstanding  wonder  of  modem  Chris¬ 
tianity  is  the  amazing  spiritual  reaction  which  per¬ 
mits  theologians  and  ecclesiastics  to  read  a  book 
of  such  broad  and  swinging  freedom,  such  un¬ 
staled  and  exuberant  variety,  as  the  Bible  exhibits, 
and  come  away  gloating  over  a  handful  of  short, 
tough  tethers  twisted  out  of  a  verse  here  and  a 
verse  there,  by  which  they  propose  to  tie  up  men 
to  a  few  stubby  peculiarities  claimed  to  be  essential 
to  religion,  if  not  the  sum  of  it.  Why  don’t  they 
take  the  road  to  the  open  heights  instead  of  back 
to  the  hitching  posts?  Was  Jesus  ever  tethered  to 
a  hitching  post  ? 

Of  course,  the  greatest  enrichments  of  theology 
have  always  been  attained  by  the  final  consent  of 
men  to  solve  such  disputes  as  we  have  spoken  of 
by  merging  the  truths  of  both  contentions.  The 
patristic  Church  achieved  such  a  victory  when  it 
resolutely  refused  to  accept  the  dilemma  thrust 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE  105 


upon  it  by  those  who  would  pronounce  the  Master 
all  divine  and  those  who  persisted  that  He  should 
be  called  only  human.  The  Church  took  from 
both  pleas  and  affirmed  the  great  composite  faith 
that  He  was  both  human  and  divine,  and  so  set  its 
seal  to  the  only  never-failing  doctrine  of  salvation 
by  “  a  great  High  Priest  who  hath  passed  through 
the  heavens  ”  and  yet  “  hath  been  in  all  points 
tempted  like  as  we  are.”  By  that  act  of  joining 
what  the  less  understanding  would  have  disjoined, 
the  fathers  saved  to  the  Church  of  Christ  the  mes¬ 
sage  out  of  which  has  gone  forth  all  the  evangel¬ 
ical  power  which  it  has  wielded  in  any  age.  Quite 
similarly  in  very  recent  days  comprehensive  Chris¬ 
tian  preachers  have  put  an  end  to  centuries  of 
rivalry  between  Arminianism  and  Calvinism  by 
proclaiming  them  in  unison  as  conjoint  halves  of 
a  single  truth.  And  presently  the  now  current 
controversy  between  liberals  and  conservatives 
over  progressive  or  static  theology  will  be  set  at 
rest  by  the  discovery  that  the  Bible  harmoniously 
includes  both. 

As  fast  as  there  comes  a  general  recognition  of 
the  hospitality  with  which  the  Bible  entertains 
together  many  varied  ideas  that  the  creeds  put  in 
opposition,  there  must  follow  a  revision  of  what 
is  understood  by  designating  the  Scriptures  as  a 
“  standard  of  doctrine.”  The  idea  which  now  pre¬ 
vails  would  set  up  the  sacred  book  as  a  sort  of 
defining  dictionary  from  which  the  only  allowable 
sense  for  each  doctrine  in  a  Christian’s  creed 
might  be  drawn  with  an  authority  strong  enough 


106  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTBIXE 


to  settle  and  end  all  discussion.  As  we  have  seen, 
the  book  is  in  reality  ill  adapted  for  that  kind  of 
thing,  and  the  only  rational  conclusion  is  that  it 
was  never  intended  for  it. 

Yet  the  Bible  is  none  the  less  a  “  standard  of 
doctrine  ” — but  rather  in  the  way  of  a  touchstone 
than  as  a  measuring  stick.  It  can’t  be  pretended 
that  the  Bible  contains  all  the  truth  in  the  universe, 
even  about  religious  matters.  But  it  does  contain 
a  great  copious  sample  of  the  truth  out  of  God’s 
deepest  and  most  eternal  vein,  and  it  serves  and 
will  always  serve  to  judge  the  genuineness  of 
whatever  else  in  man’s  philosophizing  and  in  man’s 
experience  may  turn  up  in  the  guise  of  claimed-to- 
be  wisdom.  Let  it  all  be  brought  in  and  compared ; 
if  it  agrees  with  the  fiber,  texture,  structure,  of 
the  Bible’s  highest  and  final  teachings,  let  it  be 
called  honest  goods.  But  if  it  disagrees,  then  out 
with  the  stuff ;  it  is  but  shoddy  after  all. 

Moreover,  the  Bible  stands  impregnable  as  re¬ 
minder  and  indeed  as  demonstration  that  truth 
has  an  existence,  an  objective  existence,  all  its  own. 
Constantly  through  the  ages  the  temptation  has  re¬ 
turned  on  men  to  speculate  with  the  suspicion  that 
the  only  reason  for  calling  anything  true  is  the  cir¬ 
cumstance  that  people  have  somehow  come  to  im¬ 
agine  it  true.  The  natural  sequence  is  the  sugges¬ 
tion  that  morals  and  justice  likewise  derive  from 
the  same  kind  of  human  tradition  and  consent. 
But  men  who  read  the  Bible  have  the  best  defense 
against  that  temptation.  Through  the  clear  eyes 
of  Scripture  writers  the  Christian  sees  the  Throne 


THE  MULTXPLEXITY  OP  DOCTRINE  107 


Set  eternally  in  the  midst  of  the  universe  and 
knows  that  truth  and  right  issue  forth  from  the 
ultimate  source  of  all  reality — the  pledge  of  every 
basic  fact — the  infinite  being  of  God. 

With  this  assurance  the  journey  becomes  safe 
which  so  many  private  believers  and  so  many  ac¬ 
credited  theologians  as  well  fear  to  venture  on. 
The  greatest  practical  defect  of  the  theologies 
which  seminaries  and  pulpits  promulgate  is  the 
fear  manifest  in  all  of  them  to  put  the  weight  on 
Christian  experience  which  the  Bible  puts  on  it. 
The  invariable  answer  to  every  appeal  for  more 
stress  on  the  manner  in  which  the  Scriptures  are 
validated  by  the  spiritual  response  of  those  that 
read  them,  is  a  warning  that  any  such  emphasis 
on  the  reactions  of  individual  believers  will  thrust 
the  Church  into  a  chaos  of  as  many  different  the¬ 
ologies  as  it  has  Bible-reading  members.  But  the 
response  betrays  a  fear  that  the  Bible  confounds 
openly.  Do  the  objectors  imagine  that  the  Bible 
itself  is  to  be  dissolved  into  an  airy  phantom  com¬ 
pounded  of  the  impressions  that  form  and  reform 
as  its  students  turn  its  pages?  Let  them  dismiss 
their  apprehension.  The  Bible  is  a  solid  not  so 
easily  dissolved.  The  Bible  remains  as  immovable 
as  its  God,  and  ten  thousand  years  hence,  if  the 
world  endures  so  long,  it  will  mark  the  unshaken 
foundations  of  righteousness  as  clearly  as  to-day. 
And  men  will  lay  out  their  lives  from  the  base-line 
of  its  unchanged  data  on  how  to  serve  their  Maker 
and  their  fellow  men. 

But  all  this  should  not  obscure  the  one  means 


108  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OP  DOCTEINE 


by  which  the  Bible  is  able  to  assert  any  governing 
power  over  any  man’s  actual  living  conduct — the 
one  and  only  means  also  by  which  any  man  is 
convinced  that  it  brings  him  a  trustworthy  mes¬ 
sage  from  his  Maker.  It  is  the  same  secret  of  the 
sway  of  the  Holy  Scriptures  over  men  in  Church 
and  in  world  which  will  still  explain  the  book’s 
vitality  when  that  ten  thousand  years  to  come  have 
been  absorbed  in  history.  This  secret  is  the  mystic 
fact,  which  numberless  generations  and  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  Christians  have  found  realistic 
beyond  all  telling,  that  when  one  with  earnest  mind 
reads  the  Bible,  something  within  begins  soon  to 
say,  “  That’s  true,  and  that  means  me.”  And  that 
fact  is  matched  and  clinched  by  the  other  certainty 
to  which  can  be  brought  the  testimony  of  multi¬ 
tudes  whom  no  man  can  number — the  testimony 
that  when  a  man  with  good  faith  takes  up  these 
promises  and  commands  which  so  surely  mean 
him,  and  seeks  to  live  by  them,  he  soon  returns 
saying,  44 1  have  tried  these  things  out,  and  they 
come  true;  in  experience  they  prove  themselves 
completely.”  k:  • ;  4 

Men  obey  the  Bible  because  it  imperiously  calls 
to  what  is  deepest  in  the  consciousness — even  in 
the  sub-consciousness — of  their  souls.  A  man 
reads,  44  The  Lord  is  my  shepherd,”  and  he  knows 
he  needs  a  shepherd,  and  he  trusts  the  Lord  as  a 
shepherd,  and  soon  his  neighbours  hear  him  sing¬ 
ing,  44 1  shall  not  want.”  And  all  this  is  because 
in  very  deed  the  Spirit  of  God  dwells  in  the  book. 
It  is  not  only  that  the  Spirit  once  inspired  the 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTBINE  109 


Bible.  To-day  as  ever  He — in  the  present  tense — 
inspires  it.  And  it  is  He  who,  as  Christians  read 
it,  allots  to  each  man  his  portion.  No  man  has 
quite  a  whole  Bible  for  his  own.  He  is  richest 
who  has  most  of  it,  but  no  one  is  poor  who  has 
any.  The  Spirit  gives  each  Christian  his  part,  and 
as  the  man’s  soul  grows,  he  is  let  into  a  larger  and 
richer  holding.  So  each  gets  his  own  Bible  not 
because  a  council  decreed  it  authoritative  nor  be¬ 
cause  a  Church  has  demanded  that  men  call  it  in¬ 
fallible,  but  because  he  can  tell  what  it  has  done 
for  him  and  what  it  has  made  him  do  for  God. 

This  interpretation  of  the  Scriptures  by  and 
through  the  life  tests  applied  by  the  individual 
Christian  soul  is  the  more  appropriate  to  their 
character  and  contents  because  they  are  themselves 
in  so  very  large  part  the  records  of  individual  ex¬ 
perience  in  loving  God,  trusting  God,  doing  His 
will  and  enjoying  the  fullness  of  His  providence 
and  redemption.  Extensive  portions  of  the  Bible 
are  of  course  occupied  with  the  enunciation  and 
discussion  of  general  principles  in  religion.  But  an 
even  greater  portion  consists  of  the  petitions,  the 
praises  and  the  pious  reflections  of  men  who  are 
telling  from  their  hearts  what  life  has  meant  to 
them  personally — what  cries  for  help  its  trials  have 
extorted  from  them,  what  responses  God  has 
granted  them  in  the  midst  of  hard  duty  and  strong 
struggles,  and  what  calm  of  faith  they  have  come 
to  as  they  fared  forward  in  the  midst  of  opposi¬ 
tion  and  perils. 

It  is  true  indeed  that  these  recitals  of  fears  and 


110  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTEIXE 


triumphs  are  sometimes  wrenched  from  their  real 
significance  and  made  into  blind  puzzles  for  the 
devout  by  an  unadvised  exegesis  which  treats  as  a 
universal  generalization  what  is  only  the  testimony 
of  this  or  that  saint  to  his  own  experience  of  the 
world.  The  late  Dr.  A.  Woodruff  Halsey  used  to 
tell  how,  as  he  read  from  the  Bible  to  his  saintly 
mother  in  his  boyhood,  she  intervened  when  he 
came  to  that  verse  in  the  thirty-seventh  Psalm 
which  says:  “  I  have  been  young  and  now  am  old; 
yet  have  I  not  seen  the  righteous  forsaken  nor  his 
seed  begging  bread.”  “  Stop  there,  Woody,”  she 
cried ;  “  I  have.”  And  the  good  Christian  lady 
was  not  disputing  inspiration,  either ;  she  was  sim¬ 
ply  with  admirably  unconventional  candour  rec¬ 
ognizing  the  utterance  for  exactly  what  inspira¬ 
tion  presented  it — one  certain  psalmist’s  own  ob¬ 
servation  of  God’s  care  over  His  people.  Mrs. 
Halsey’s  observation  happened  to  be  different,  and 
it  was  neither  irreverent  nor  skeptical  for  her  to 
say  so. 

One  reads  likewise  in  the  ninety-first  Psalm  an¬ 
other  psalmist’s  assurance  in  the  midst  of  some 
great  plague  that  the  pestilence  would  not  be  per¬ 
mitted  to  smite  his  life  to  destroy  it.  No  doubt 
his  confidence  in  the  special  providence  of  such 
protection  was  fulfilled  for  him — the  psalm  would 
scarcely  have  been  preserved  otherwise.  Yet  its 
appearance  in  the  Bible  is  no  guarantee  that  all 
other  God-fearing  men  will  be  delivered  from 
death  in  any  and  every  peril  that  may  happen  to 
overtake  them.  Every  man’s  times  are  in  the 


THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE  111 


hand  of  a  loving  Lord,  and  there  are  no  guaran¬ 
tees  to  any  man  except  that  if  he  does  his  best  for 
God,  God  will  do  what  is  best  for  him. 

None  the  less  these  tributes  of  trust  and  praise 
which  holy  men  of  old  have  been  prompted  out  of 
their  own  private  experience  of  God’s  goodness  to 
render  to  Him  for  all  His  mercies,  have  their 
rightful  and  honoured  place  in  the  book  by  which 
God  is  pleased  to  reveal  His  ways  and  purposes  to 
mankind.  They  testify,  not  to  any  mechanical 
contrivance  by  which  God  grinds  out  good  things 
to  men  from  the  wheels  and  cogs  of  an  irrespective 
fate,  but  to  the  everlasting  kindliness  with  which 
He  watches  over  each  of  His  children  and  appor¬ 
tions  to  each  what  shall  best  reward  his  deserv- 
ings,  best  discipline  his  shortcomings  and  bring 
him  most  securely  to  the  particular  rounding  out 
of  life  that  best  fulfills  the  particular  fitness  of  his 
particular  soul. 

Especially  do  these  and  a  hundred  other  pas¬ 
sages  testify  to  the  great  and  comprehensive  fact 
that  God’s  allotments  to  the  righteous  are  allot¬ 
ments  of  prosperity  and  gladness  many  times 
oftener  than  He  apportions  the  allotments  of  woe 
and  sorrow,  to  which  bear  witness  other  Biblical 
transcripts  of  Christian  experience  equally  inspired 
because  equally  real.  Not  from  one  sort  of  Scrip¬ 
ture  nor  from  the  other  taken  alone — neither  from 
the  triumphantly  joyful  nor  from  the  dolefully 
sorrowful — would  a  modern  Bible  student  derive  a 
full  and  fair  account  of  God’s  dealings  with  His 
children  whom  He  loves.  But  with  the  light  of 


112  THE  MULTIPLEXITY  OF  DOCTRINE 


the  one  kind  of  Bible  testimony  mingling  amid  the 
shading  and  the  shadows  of  the  darker  sort,  the 
Christian  who  attends  to  the  Scriptures  in  whole 
and  not  in  part  sees  a  picture  vivid  with  all  the 
mercies,  both  dark  and  bright,  of  an  ever  living 
and  ever  loving  Father. 

Vain  then  are  the  arguments  which  the  schools 
bring  to  demonstrate  the  authority  of  the  Scrip¬ 
tures — impotent  the  resolutions  that  assemblies 
adopt  rebuking  those  who  acknowledge  doubts. 
The  Bible’s  ascendancy  over  the  minds  of  men  can 
be  confirmed  by  no  such  external  measures.  All 
is  done  when  personally  for  each  Bible-reader  that 
happens  which  Cowper  describes  so  simply — the 
truest,  finest  thing  ever  written  about  the  Bible 
outside  itself: 

“  The  Spirit  breathes  upon  the  word 
And  brings  the  truth  to  light.” 


XI 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON 

IS  it  impertinent  to  exercise  the  human  reason 
on  a  book  of  divine  inspiration?  Over  this 
question  many  Christians  conceive  that  a  pro¬ 
foundly  divisive  difference  exists  in  the  contem¬ 
porary  Church.  On  the  part  of  a  host  of  conser¬ 
vatives  it  is  received  as  an  axiom  that  what  God 
has  published  to  the  world  as  His  word  of  author¬ 
ity  must  in  the  nature  of  the  case  be  read  with  un¬ 
questioning  acceptance.  From  this  standpoint  it  is 
no  wonder  that  men  who  write  books  of  Biblical 
criticism  appear  impious  persons. 

The  matter  here  at  stake  is  not,  however,  en¬ 
tirely  axiomatic.  A  deeper  issue  than  either  con¬ 
servatives  or  liberals  realize  underlies  the  question. 
The  thing  to  be  first  decided  is  whether  God  has 
given  men  a  book  on  which  it  is  suitable  for  them 
to  bring  reason  to  bear — or  whether  it  is  a  book  in 
essence  forbidding  to  reason.  If  God  meant  His 
volume  of  Scripture  never  to  be  reasoned  about, 
then  of  course  it  is  impertinence  to  offer  a  man’s 
opinion  concerning  it.  But  if  God  intended  His 
book  to  awaken  and  summon  forth  the  gift  of  rea¬ 
soning  with  which  He  has  endowed  man,  then  re¬ 
fusing  to  apply  reason  to  the  Bible  is  irreverent. 

113 


114  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON 


Can  we  know  how  in  this  particular  it  is  God’s 
pleasure  to  have  the  Scriptures  dealt  with? 

In  the  familiar  forms  of  secular  writing  it  is 
never  difficult  to  determine  which  are  intended  to 
encourage  and  which  to  discourage  independent 
exercise  of  the  mind.  One  type  of  expression 
conspicuously  not  calculated  to  induce  thought 
readily  suggests  itself ;  it  is  the  highly  specialized 
style  in  which  the  civic  laws  of  modern  states  are 
written.  Any  one  who  has  so  much  as  looked 
inside  a  statute  book  knows  the  reiteration  of 
terms,  the  multiplication  of  synonyms,  the  enumer¬ 
ation  of  every  conceivable  contingency,  whereby  it 
is  hoped  to  put  the  letter  of  the  law  beyond  the 
possibility  of  two  constructions  at  any  point  what¬ 
ever.  The  man  therefore  who  reads  a  legislative 
act  is  supposed  to  have  but  one  business  laid  upon 
him;  that  is  to  comprehend  what  the  law  says. 
Reasoning,  pro  or  con,  on  these  premises,  is  super¬ 
fluous. 

It  is  true,  indeed,  that  this  theory  of  the  matter 
fails  to  work  out.  An  endless  succession  of 
judicial  decisions  learnedly  interpreting  disputed 
legislation  constitutes  an  ever  present  proof  that 
people  do  not  understand  the  laws  identically,  how¬ 
soever  painstakingly  legislators  may  draw  them. 
But  always  this  effort  to  be  unmistakable  results 
in  a  quite  distinctive  kind  of  product,  which  on 
the  most  casual  reading  exposes  the  purpose  to 
regimentalize  all  ideas  based  upon  it.  Something 
of  the  same  kind  may  be  observed  in  school  text¬ 
books — especially  text-books  in  the  sciences — 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  EEASON  115 


where  language  is  put  through  its  best  disciplined 
paces  with  the  sole  idea  of  forbidding  it  to  mean 
or  even  to  suggest  anything  more  than  the  one 
exact  conception  which  standard  science  is  ready 
to  ratify.  Theology  also,  writing  its  creeds  with  a 
like  concern  to  mean  just  what  it  means  and  no 
more  nor  less,  has  to  adopt  much  the  same  kind  of 
strait-laced  pronunciamento  diction. 

What  is  to  be  thought  of  here,  however,  is  not 
the  success  or  the  ill  success  of  such  efforts  to  say 
something  that  can  neither  be  debated  nor  vari¬ 
ously  interpreted.  The  more  important  observa¬ 
tion  just  now  is  that  no  writing  which  even  aims 
at  that  effect — legal,  scientific,  creedal  or  in  any 
form  dogmatic — ever  impressed  anybody  as  liter¬ 
ature.  Literature  in  all  tongues  and  in  all  times 
has  exactly  the  opposite  influence.  Instead  of  cir¬ 
cumscribing  and  confining  thought,  standardizing 
opinion  and  repressing  imagination,  literature  fires 
and  stirs  minds  that  read,  until  thought  leaps  up 
to  seize  ideals  belonging  in  loftier  altitudes  and 
imagination  takes  wings  to  distances  that  the  mere 
words  as  written  would  never  measure. 

Who  would  read  a  poem  that  tied  down  the  soul 
to  the  baldly  literal  sense  of  each  noun  and  adjec¬ 
tive  and  verb  used  to  fill  out  the  beat  of  the  meter? 
A  poem  is  no  poem  unless  it  releases  fancies  and 
aspirations  and  bids  them  soar  where  the  only 
chart  is  the  sunny  joy  of  living  in  the  love  of  God. 
Chains  and  walls  can  be  made  of  words,  and  walls, 
if  not  chains,  have  their  uses.  But  such  are  not 
the  winged  words  of  literature.  They  do  not  con- 


116  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  KEASON 


fine  but  set  free.  They  do  not  forbid  men  to 
think;  they  compel  thinking.  They  do  not  dull 
and  stifle  reason;  they  arouse  the  reason  with 
scores  of  questions  and  set  it  searching  earth  and 
heaven  for  answers  fit  to  be  named  rational. 
What  really  good  book,  out  of  all  that  are  found 
written  by  men  in  all  the  libraries  of  the  world, 
can  a  man  read  without  stirring  his  reasoning  pow¬ 
ers  into  vivid  activity — accumulating  confirma¬ 
tions,  extending  deductions,  applying  principles  to 
added  instances? 

From  this  digression  then  the  inquiry  returns  to 
ask  once  more  which  kind  of  book  God  has  pre¬ 
pared  for  men  in  His  Bible.  Is  it  a  manual  of 
statutes  restricting  human  life  within  a  framework 
of  unyielding  rules?  Or  is  it  a  volume  of  en¬ 
franchising  literature  challenging  men  to  adventure 
the  greatening  of  their  spiritual  knowledge  by  ex¬ 
ploration  of  the  ways  of  God?  Manifestly,  in¬ 
deed,  a  part  of  the  Bible  is  formed  on  the  pattern 
of  all  legalism — a  structure  of  minute  external  re¬ 
quirements  wrought  into  an  inflexible  system  of 
corporate  conformity.  Such  is  the  character  of 
the  Mosaic  law,  which  constitutes  so  large  a  frac¬ 
tion  of  the  second,  third,  fourth  and  fifth  books  of 
the  Old  Testament.  Certain  later  parts  of  the 
same  Testament  likewise,  though  they  do  not  par¬ 
take  of  the  form,  are  characterized  in  general  by 
the  same  governing  outlook. 

But  of  the  larger  mass  of  the  Bible  there  need 
be  no  hesitance  in  naming  a  different  classification. 
The  contributions  made  to  its  contents  by  its  poets 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON  117 


(both  dramatic  and  lyric),  its  sages  of  the  old  He¬ 
brew  “  wisdom/'  its  story-tellers,  its  prophets,  its 
evangelists,  its  apostles,  and  above  all,  by  its  im¬ 
mortal  Messiah — all  these  are  literature  of  a  qual¬ 
ity  shiningly  beyond  all  categories  of  “  the  letter/' 
which  Paul  complained  of  as  “  killing  ”  the  spir¬ 
ituality  of  believers.  They  all  instead  are  instinct 
with  the  spirit  which  (quoting  Paul  again)  “  giv- 
eth  life/'  Indeed,  the  richest  treasures  of  Bible 
literature  are  those  very  words  which  He  who 
spoke  them  declared  to  be  in  and  of  themselves 
“  spirit  and  life." 

Utterly  vain  then  is  it  to  talk  of  not  employing 
human  reason  on  the  Bible.  With  a  non-literary 
Bible  that  might  be  feasible,  but  not  with  this 
Bible.  In  the  presence  of  a  book  crammed  with 
ideas  that  awaken  the  human  mind  as  spring  sun¬ 
shine  awakens  sleeping  flowers,  by  what  unnat¬ 
ural  and  repressive  magic  is  it  proposed  to  prevent 
reason  from  sharing  in  the  response  of  the  soul? 
Or  who  imagines  that  when  God  calls  humanity 
to  participate  in  His  glowing  and  kindling 
thoughts,  He  invites  the  tribute  of  every  faculty  in 
human  nature  save  that  which  is  best  able  to  ap¬ 
preciate  purpose,  plan,  cause,  effect,  continuity  and 
consistency?  When  did  the  Creator  ever  brand 
man’s  reason  as  unholy — unfit  to  handle  the  sacred 
things  of  either  His  deeds  or  of  His  words? 

Equally  impermissible  is  it  to  suppose  that  man's 
reason  is  bidden  to  engage  itself  only  with  those 
things  in  the  Scriptures  that  are  plain  to  see  and 
understand ;  the  very  nature  of  reason,  as  God  has 


118  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OP  REASON 


embedded  it  in  the  intelligence  of  men,  gives  it  a 
houndlike  scent  for  what  is  not  plain,  for  what  is 
apparently  altogether  non-understandable.  It 
would  be  therefore  mere  mockery  for  the  Giver  of 
the  Bible  to  set  a  boundary  in  it  between  the  ob¬ 
vious  and  the  obscure,  and  prohibit  the  reader 
from  taking  his  reasonableness  with  him  across 
that  line.  To  be  sure,  the  keenest  of  reason  will 
never  penetrate  to  the  center  of  religion’s  mys¬ 
teries.  But  let  us  be  also  sure  that  God  hinders 
it  not  from  going  as  far  as  it  is  able.  It  is  pre¬ 
posterous  to  put  all  this  artificial  enmity  between 
reason  and  revelation.  God  gave  both,  and  He 
prepared  the  one  that  it  might  receive  the  other. 
He  has  fitted  each  to  each.  Every  page  of  the 
Bible  might  be  justly  inscribed  with  the  invitation 
which  stands  in  living  letters  on  the  first  page  of 
the  Prophet  Isaiah :  “  Come  now  and  let  us  reason 
together,  saith  Jehovah.”  Reason  is  God’s  joy — 
not  His  “  black  beast.” 

It  is  by  no  means  beside  the  mark  here  to  ob¬ 
serve  how  ironical  a  paradox  dogs  the  footsteps 
of  those  who  maintain  that  every  Bible  utterance 
is  to  be  taken  in  its  simplest  literal  sense  and  must 
not  be  subjected  in  any  particular  to  rationalizing 
interpretation.  This  they  cling  to,  oblivious  of  the 
pragmatic  contradiction  which  their  very  ortho¬ 
doxy  compels.  For  their  theory  also  obliges  them 
to  hold  that  every  Bible  verse  in  its  simple  literal 
sense  is  an  explicitly  exact  statement  of  fact. 
When  therefore  two  such  verses  appear  on  their 
face  to  present  quite  different  views  of  matters  to 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON  119 


which  both  allude — and  any  Bible  reader  knows 

how  often  that  happens — there  conies  a  serious 

strain  on  consistency.  No  other  resort  is  open 

than  to  proceed  to  “  reconcile  ”  them  by  whatever 

supposition  appears  least  violent.  It  often  seems, 

when  one  picks  up  a  typical  Bible  commentary  of 

the  literalist  school,  that  the  larger  portion  of  the 

volume  is  occupied  with  the  anxious  labour  of  such 

reconciliations. 

• 

By  what  means  then  is  this  reconciling  accom¬ 
plished?  Why,  by  means  of  human  reason  ap¬ 
plied  to  interpret  concordantly  the  text  of  the 
Scriptures.  There  is  no  other  means  by  which  it 
can  be  done.  No  matter  how  strenuously  a  man 
mav  contend  that  such  and  such  a  single  passage 
must  be  taken  to  signify  just  what  it  says,  when 
he  brings  two  passages  together  (especially  if  their 
harmony  is  to  his  mind  predetermined),  he  finds 
himself  in  spite  of  himself  reasoning  out  unity  be¬ 
tween  them  according  to  his  own  intelligence.  An 
inference  from  one  statement  applied  to  amplify 
a  scanter  allusion  in  the  other;  an  explanation, 
transferred  perhaps  in  the  opposite  direction, 
carrying  a  new  shade  of  colour  into  a  narrative 
that  standing  alone  would  bear  a  quite  different 
implication;  the  composite  revision  of  an  entire 
story  in  order  to  weave  in  all  the  incidents  found 
in  two  independent  accounts — these  are  familiar 
expedients  to  which  conservative  scholars  en¬ 
gaged  in  the  exegesis  of  the  Bible  are  constrained 
to  devote  prodigious  ingenuity. 

Such  devices  are  of  course  employed  in  all  sin- 


120  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  EEASON 


cerity  of  devotion  to  the  truth  of  God;  they  are 
honest  efforts  to  make  that  truth  more  lucid.  But 
certainly  the  reflective  and  the  scrupulous  among 
students  using  these  methods  of  exposition  cannot 
pretend  to  abide  by  the  dictum  that  men  have  no 
right  to  invade  the  realm  of  divine  revelation  with 
reason’s  readjustments.  It  is  that  very  thing  that 
they  are  doing  all  the  while.  Their  experience 
and  example  are  rather  a  practical  demonstration 
that  the  Bible  cannot  be  appropriated  in  all  its 
values  by  anybody  who  does  not  look  at  it  in  the 
light  of  the  best  human  faculties  that  can  be 
brought  to  bear  upon  it. 

It  may  seem  a  jesting  “  tu  quoque  ”  to  say  of 
the  literally  orthodox  in  Bible  studies  that  they 
are  more  inveterate  rationalists  than  the  higher 
critics  whom  they  so  unanimously  condemn.  But 
it  is  not  a  jest;  it  is  the  easily  observable  fact. 
Confronting  a  so-called  “  difficulty  ”  as  between 
two  seemingly  disagreeing  portions  of  Scripture, 
the  liberal  scholar  is  usually  content  to  let  the  text 
stand  undisturbed  and  even  unexplained  just  as  it 
is.  The  conservative,  on  the  contrary,  weaves  a 
great  net  of  cross  references  by  which  he  drags 
the  questioned  paragraph  or  chapter  into  a  de¬ 
cidedly  different  orientation.  Sometimes  the  new 
angle  of  vision  opened  up  by  this  process  puts  the 
truth  in  clearer  light,  and  the  scholarship  which 
accomplishes  it  would  elicit  the  gratitude  of  all 
Bible-lovers  except  for  one  flaw  in  its  picture  of 
reality — the  pious  pretense  that  the  result  reached 
in  this  fashion  is  itself  dogmatically  infallible  and 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON  121 


not  the  product  of  a  purely  human  exercise  in  the 
art  of  rationalizing  the  varied  materials  of  the 
Bible. 

An  instance  of  the  tireless  zeal  with  which  these 
rationalistic  efforts  are  carried  on  by  those  who 
imagine  that  nothing  else  will  put  an  unshakable 
foundation  under  the  Bible,  is  the  labour  that  has 
been  spent  to  explain  how  it  happened  that  King 
Saul  did  not  recognize  the  youth  who  fought 
Goliath  if  that  youth,  according  to  the  letter  of  the 
history,  had  already  been  Saul’s  favourite  harper 
in  his  own  court.  The  higher  critic  says:  “Two 
traditions  ” — and  lets  it  go  at  that.  The  man  who 
believes  that  he  is  no  kind  of  a  critic  at  all,  who 
boasts  that  he  takes  everything  in  the  Bible  in 
exactly  the  way  it  is  stated  and  asks  no  question, 
says:  “  Now  we  have  got  to  figure  this  thing  out  ” 
— and  puckers  his  brows  for  hours  at  a  time  at¬ 
tempting  to  range  all  the  data  of  the  story  in  one 
consistent  chain.  He  has  a  perfect  right  to.  But 
it’s  reason  he’s  using;  he’s  an  undeniable  ration¬ 
alist — trying  by  reasoh  to  establish  something  not 
said  in  the  Bible. 

A  case  still  more  egregious  of  the  same  charac¬ 
ter  is  the  premillennial  program  which  a  strong 
party  of  uncompromising  dogmatists  have  worked 
out,  professing  to  show  the  exact  course  of  events 
which  must  intervene  between  the  present  hour 
and  the  reappearance  of  Jesus  Christ  on  the  earth 
— including  the  surreptitious  removal  from  the 
world  of  all  true  Christians  and  an  ensuing  erup¬ 
tion  of  general  horror  outdoing  the  worst  previous 


122  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  SEASON 


experiences  of  the  race.  Every  item  of  this  pre¬ 
diction  is  supported  by  an  authentic  Bible  citation. 
Nevertheless  it  is  precisely  true  to  say  that  nothing 
like  this  foreseen  history  can  be  read  in  any  part 
of  the  Bible.  As  a  connected  prophecy  it  is  wholly 
a  piece  of  man’s  device.  For  in  spite  of  these 
quotations  all  being  in  Scripture,  there  is  not  even 
the  ground  plan  there  for  the  scheme  of  association 
by  which  they  are  brought  together. 

Many  of  the  passages  thus  used  were  never  sup¬ 
posed  either  by  their  writers  or  by  their  earlier 
readers  to  have  anything  to  do  with  the  end  of  the 
world.  Of  others  it  can  only  be  said  that  the 
exegesis  to  which  premillenarians  submit  them 
leaves  lingering  in  free  minds  a  large  measure  of 
doubt.  But  putting  these  things  aside,  the  matter 
evident  beyond  controversy  is  that,  however  in¬ 
fallible  may  be  the  individual  proof-texts  of  this 
cult,  the  pattern  of  the  mosaic  into  which  they 
are  forcibly  fitted  bears  not  the  faintest  glint  of 
infallibility.  They  could  be  laid  together  quite  as 
readily  in  a  totally  different  design;  in  fact,  that 
has  been  often  done  by  postmillennialists  who  felt 
just  as  sure  of  themselves  as  the  premillennialists 
could  ever  be.  It  ought  to  be  the  candid  admis¬ 
sion  of  the  latter  that  their  picture  of  great  and 
terrible  events  speedily  to  come  is  not  what  the 
Scripture  says,  but  what  their  own  very  human 
reason  has  somewhat  plausibly  managed  to  make 
Scripture  appear  to  say.  It  is  rationalism  pure  and 
simple — though  certainly  not  to  be  branded  un¬ 
true  on  that  sole  account. 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON  123 


It  is  then  not  simply  allowable  to  bring  the  in¬ 
spired  Scriptures  under  the  survey  of  human  rea¬ 
son;  it  is  by  the  very  character  of  the  book  ren¬ 
dered  imperative.  And  this  necessity  has  bearings 
far  wider  than  the  comparatively  insignificant 
matters  that  have  served  us  for  passing  illustra¬ 
tion.  There  is  involved  in  it  the  primary  vindica¬ 
tion  of  that  often  scorned  discipline  of  the  church 
— systematic  theology.  There  is  no  systematic  the¬ 
ology  in  the  Bible,  but  the  Bible  none  the  less  con¬ 
ducts  the  actively  thoughtful  student  to  a  point 
where  some  kind  of  theology,  more  or  less  sys¬ 
tematic,  becomes  the  indispensable  apparel  of  his 
pilgrimage.  He  gets  it  by  weaving  Bible  woof 
into  the  warp  of  his  own  inquisitive  soul,  and  the 
fabric  often  outlasts  the  long  journey. 

More  popularly  significant,  however,  is  the  pro¬ 
priety  which  by  this  view  of  reason  and  the  Bible 
is  conceded  to  Biblical  criticism  as  a  reverential 
employment  for  competent  Christian  men.  In 
great  sections  of  the  Church  there  still  prevails 
the  inquisitorial  prejudice  which  would  put  criti¬ 
cism  of  the  Scriptures  in  the  calendar  of  supreme 
atrocities.  But  when  it  is  once  shown  that  the 
conservative  is  as  little  able  as  the  radical  to  avoid 
judging  the  Bible  with  whatever  intellectual  light 
he  has — that  virtually  God  Himself  has  compelled 
such  judgment — there  must  certainly  ensue  a  saner 
attitude  toward  the  critics  and  a  better  discrimina¬ 
tion  between  the  good  and  the  bad  among  them — 
or  as  is  perhaps  safer  to  say,  between  the  better 
and  the  worse. 


124  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OP  BEASON 

Much  misunderstanding  and  even  more  hatred, 
as  useless  as  it  is  unjustifiable,  inhere  in  the 
chronic  misreading  of  the  very  term  “  criticism.” 
Even  persons  of  education  and  extensive  knowl¬ 
edge  suffer  themselves  subconsciously  to  entertain 
the  vernacular  sense  of  the  verb  “  criticise  ”  and  of 
its  derivatives,  assuming  that  criticism  is  simply 
an  inveterate  faultfinding,  elevated  in  the  univer¬ 
sities  to  the  dignity  of  a  learned  profession.  But 
of  course  this  phraseology  as  applied  to  the  Bible 
and  all  Bible  subjects  rises  to  the  plane  of  the 
technical  conception  cherished  in  literature  and  the 
arts — the  thought  that  criticism  is,  first  of  all,  ap¬ 
plause  of  excellencies,  and  only  by  negative  con¬ 
sequence  comes  round  to  the  marking  of  faults. 
To  the  Bible  critic  then  the  Church  should  come 
not  expecting  a  discount  on  the  Scriptures,  en¬ 
forced  by  a  catalogue  of  defects  and  deficiencies, 
but  frankly  anticipating  from  him  some  fresh 
tribute  to  the  greatness  and  grandeur  of  the  book 
of  God. 

Were  that  anticipation  prevalent  among  every¬ 
day  Christians,  pastors  and  laymen,  its  magnetism 
would  no  doubt  draw  forth  from  scholarship  an 
expanding  eloquence  on  the  power  and  nobility  of 
the  massive  Bible  entire,  in  lieu  of  penny-counting 
rivalries  to  see  who  can  collect  from  odd  corners 
of  the  book  the  largest  symposium  of  insignificant 
guesses  at  possible  mistakes.  Already  there  is  a 
great  change  observable  from  the  negative  effect 
of  earlier  movements  of  criticism,  and  the  morn¬ 
ing  of  appreciation  following  a  too  lengthy  night 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  KEASON  125 


of  depreciation  is  surely  dawning  over  the  Scrip¬ 
tural  studies  of  this  generation.  When  that  morn¬ 
ing  is  fully  come  all  men  will  be  able  to  see  how 
fruitful  is  the  result  of  sowing  human  intelligence 
in  an  inspired  soil. 

There  are  those  who  consider  it  a  useful  dis¬ 
crimination  to  divide  between  constructive  critics 
and  destructive  critics,  applauding  the  former, 
anathematizing  the  latter.  But  that  test  is  rather 
too  tedious  in  confirmation  to  serve  for  present 
guidance;  not  for  a  generation  or  two  will  it  be 
possible  to  tell  whether  our  contemporary  critics 
are  constructing  what  will  stand  or  destroying 
what  ought  to  stand.  But  there  is  a  distinction 
which  should  always  be  easy  for  the  just-minded 
to  apply.  There  are  some  critics  who  despise  the 
Bible  and  are  bent  on  ridiculing  it  into  oblivion; 
there  are  other  critics  who  love  it  and  are  passion¬ 
ately  anxious  to  set  it  forth  in  so  clear  and  ap¬ 
pealing  a  light  that  it  will  win  constantly — and 
most  of  all  among  the  young — more  faith,  more 
trust,  more  usage,  more  vital  vogue  in  private  lives 
and  popular  affairs.  The  first,  no  matter  how 
erudite  they  are  or  even  how  meticulously  correct, 
are  not  of  our  company;  let  them  range  themselves 
with  the  foe.  But  the  other  sort — the  true  Bible- 
lovers — are  allies  in  the  militant  kingdom  of  God 
with  all  good  disciples  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  in  their 
fellowship  we  shall  go  forward  to  a  brighter  and 
larger  appropriation  of  the  revelation  of  God  as 
contained  in  the  Scriptures  of  the  Old  and  New 
Testaments. 


126  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON 


And  yet — and  yet — let  us  remind  ourselves,  ere 
we  pass  from  this  theme,  that  none  of  the  Bible 
writers  were  either  critics  or  theologians  in  any 
such  sense  as  these  terms  convey  in  present-day 
schools  and  churches.  This  is  true  even  of  Paul 
and  John,  who  are  now  regarded  as  prototypes 
and  patron  saints  of  all  the  race  and  lineage  of 
theological  professors.  John  at  Ephesus  preached 
Jesus  as  the  eternally  preexistent  Word  by  whom 
all  things  were  made,  and  Paul  with  passionate 
earnestness  wrote  to  the  Romans  of  God's  ability 
to  justify  sinners  because  of  the  propitiation 
wrought  on  the  cross  in  the  blood  of  Christ.  In 
what  they  said  of  these  matters  there  were  in¬ 
cluded  all  the  elements  out  of  which  have  been 
later  constructed  the  theological  doctrines  of  the 
Trinity  and  the  atonement.  But  neither  Paul  nor 
John  nor  any  other  Bible  writer  ever  developed 
either  of  these  fundamental  articles  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  faith  into  a  philosophic  dogma. 

Afterward  came  those  who,  when  they  had  said 
that  the  Father,  the  Son  and  the  Holy  Spirit  are 
equally  divine,  found  themselves  constrained  in 
their  own  minds  to  try  to  define  how  these  three 
personalities  could  consist  together  in  one  God¬ 
head — to  say  how  men  might  believe  in  the  God¬ 
head  of  all  three  without  believing  in  three  Gods. 
Likewise  they  deemed  it  needful  to  describe  in 
terms  of  philosophy  just  how  it  was  that  the  death 
of  Christ  on  the  cross  enabled  the  Holy  God  to  blot 
out  the  sins  of  the  unholy  and  receive  them  to 
Himself.  They  who  felt  this  urge  were  not. 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON  127 


however,  the  apostles  or  their  contemporaries; 
they  were  a  later  rank  of  Christian  leaders — the 
generation  of  Nicsea  and  thereabouts.  Their 
work,  therefore,  while  worthy  of  immense  honour, 
bears  no  such  peculiar  seal  of  divinity  as  the  in¬ 
spiring  Spirit  has  used  to  certify  the  New  Testa¬ 
ment.  The  formulation  of  theology  was  strictly  a 
post-Biblical  development. 

Whoever  then  with  sincerity  regards  the  Bible 
as  the  paramount  standard  by  which  faith  is  to  be 
tested,  must  needs  recognize  as  orthodox  any  faith 
accepting  and  building  upon  the  Bible  facts, 
whether  the  philosophy  now  derived  from  those 
facts  agrees  or  does  not  agree  with  explanations 
of  the  same  that  were  favoured  by  the  Nicene  and 
later  theologians.  The  modern  disciple  who  like 
Paul  looks  upon  Jesus  as  “  existing  in  the  form  of 
God,”  by  that  consideration  alone  comes  well 
within  the  range  of  the  historic  trinitarianism  of 
Christianity.  And  he  is  not  to  be  excluded  if  in 
place  of  the  Nicene  distinction  of  three  persons  in 
one  God  he  distinguishes  rather  three  manifesta¬ 
tions  of  one  God.  From  anything  that  Paul  or 
John  wrote  on  the  subject  it  is  impossible  to  tell 
which  was  the  view  of  either  of  them.  Perhaps, 
in  the  midst  of  engrossing  missionary  and  pastoral 
service,  neither  ever  penetrated  far  enough  into  the 
psychic  problem  to  work  out  a  definite  thought  of 
how  the  Son  was  metaphysically  related  to  the 
Father. 

So  too  these  great  apostolic  teachers  probably 
never  weighed  and  balanced  theories  of  the  atone^ 


128  THE  EMPLOYMENT  OF  REASON 


ment  as  Christian  philosophers  have  done  in  the 
centuries  since.  So  far  as  their  writings  tell,  the 
apostles  simply  took  the  fact  and  ended  there. 
They  said:  “  Christ  died  for  our  sins  according  to 
the  Scriptures.”  And  inasmuch  as  that  message  ef¬ 
fectually  saved  men,  it  fully  contented  the  preach¬ 
ers  of  it.  Whoever  then  can  truly  echo  that  word, 
is  an  orthodox  follower  of  the  apostles.  He  be¬ 
lieves  and  teaches  the  atonement.  And  it  is  all 
one  whether  he  considers  that  Jesus  thus  died  for 
the  sinner  as  a  substituted  sacrifice  or  in  a  great 
dramatic  demonstration  of  an  everlasting  divine 
love  stronger  than  death  and  supreme  in  unselfish¬ 
ness.  Taking  the  atonement  either  way,  the 
Christian  is  honestly  accepting  all  that  the  Bible 
says.  Explanations  one  way  or  the  other  are 
purely  human  addenda,  in  which  no  doubt  it  is 
pleasing  to  God  for  the  speculations  of  men  to  range 
broadly,  since  the  sum  of  them  all,  woven  into  the 
chain  of  reverent  Christian  thought,  still  consti¬ 
tutes  a  measure  far  too  short  to  encompass  the 
whole  significance  of  Christ’s  self-devotion  in  life 
and  in  death  for  the  sinner’s  sake. 

Let  us  then  by  no  means  discard  our  theologies. 
Used  aright,  they  can  cast  great  illumination  on 
the  pathway  of  the  Church’s  progress  to  the  fuller 
meanings  of  religion.  But  let  us  ever  remember 
that  not  our  theologies,  but  the  Gospel  about,  of 
and  in  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  is  the  power  that  is 
to  save  the  world.  And  it  is  not  theology  but  Gos¬ 
pel  that  the  Bible  furnishes.  So  may  we  accustom 
ourselves  often  to  return  from  the  cloistered  re- 


THE  EMPLOYMENT  OP  REASON  129 


treats  in  which  the  philosophers  of  the  Church 
work  out  their  elaborate  reconstructions  of  Bible 
data,  and  seek  company  instead  with  the  first  di¬ 
rect  and  urgent  preachers  of  the  evangel,  who,  in¬ 
nocent  of  the  dogmatizing  which  less  eager  ages 
have  loitered  to  indulge,  “  knew  nothing  save  Jesus 
Christ  and  him  crucified.”  We  shall  be  closer  to 
the  real  heart  of  our  Lord  the  oftener  we  set  aside 
all  later  sophistications  and  refresh  our  souls  anew 
with  the  spontaneous  simplicities  amid  which  Jesus 
and  His  twelve  companions  walked  in  the  early; 
days  of  our  religion. 


XII 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


THE  fear  prompting  resistance  to  the  use 
of  men’s  reason  in  Bible  exegesis  is  more 
than  all  else  a  dread  of  what  will  happen 
to  the  miracle  stories  in  the  book.  The  modern 
mind,  everybody  realizes,  is  not  predisposed  to  ac¬ 
cept  miracle  stories  from  any  source,  being  of 
course  in  this  respect  quite  opposite  to  the  general 
mind  of  the  times  in  which  the  Bible  was  pro¬ 
duced.  Will  not  then  twentieth-century  reason,  if 
given  free  sweep,  expel  from  the  Bible  every  ex¬ 
ample  of  supernatural  intervention?  It  is  this 
peril  which,  as  many  conceive,  can  only  be  met  by 
saying  to  men:  “Whatever  is  told  in  this  book 
you  must  believe  just  because  it  is  found  here. 
You  are  not  permitted  to  inquire  about  the  ac¬ 
curacy  of  any  of  it.” 

It  would  perhaps  make  for  quietude  in  many 
quarters  if  the  matter  could  be  so  clamped  down 
and  left  undisturbed.  But  if  we  have  been  at  all 
right  in  arguing  that  the  Bible  is  not  only  lawfully 
open  to  the  investigations  of  human  reason  but  is 
divinely  calculated  to  invoke  (even  provoke)  such 
investigation,  then  it  is  clear  that  the  miracles  re¬ 
lated  therein  cannot  be  excluded  from  the  scope 

130 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


131 


of  this  questioning.  Nor  can  a  predetermined  au¬ 
thentication  of  them  be  guaranteed  before  the  in¬ 
quiry  begins.  Predetermination  of  the  outcome 
takes  the  honesty  out  of  any  inquiry.  Neverthe¬ 
less  the  case  for  the  miraculous  is  not  to  be 
thought  forfeited  by  granting  such  freedom.  In¬ 
dependent  external  corroboration  that  the  marvels 
told  of  in  the  Bible  actually  happened  has  of  course 
long  since  become  impossible.  But  the  moral  pre¬ 
sumptions  in  favour  of  that  supernatural  setting  in 
which  the  major  miracles  of  Bible  history  appear 
— and  in  which  their  spiritual  significance  makes 
them  rationally  plausible — grow  stronger  as  views 
of  Bible  revelation  grow  more  comprehensive. 

It  will  increase,  however,  for  the  believer  both 
the  clarity  of  his  own  thinking  on  this  subject 
and  his  sympathy  for  those  who  are  unable  to 
partake  of  his  credence,  if  he  considers  why  the 
mind  of  these  times  has  a  difficulty  with  miracles 
which  earlier  generations  did  not  experience. 
There  is  in  part  involved  no  doubt  a  certain  un¬ 
moral  resistance  to  religious  obligation,  but  that 
is  nothing  new.  There  has  always  been  in  use 
among  irreligious  men  some  such  “  protective 
mechanism  ”  for  shielding  uncomfortable  con¬ 
sciences;  an  impersonal  discussion  of  theology  is 
much  more  agreeable  to  sustain  than  pointed  refer¬ 
ence  to  the  need  for  correcting  one’s  own  attitude 
toward  God.  In  all  generations  whatever  matters 
might  at  the  time  be  topics  of  current  controversy 
in  religion,  have  been  impartially  availed  of  by 
persons  whose  only  really  anxious  care  was  to 


132 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


save  themselves  from  being  driven  to  close  quar¬ 
ters  on  the  subject  of  their  own  spiritual  duty. 
Such  people  to-day  find  that  nothing  else  serves  so 
well  for  defensive  diversion  as  the  loud  announce¬ 
ment:  “  I  don’t  believe  in  the  miracles  that  we  read 
about  in  the  Bible.” 

Yet  this  in  no  way  accounts  for  the  specific 
trouble  which  nowadays  men  have  in  adjusting 
their  intelligence  to  the  conception  of  a  miracle. 
Thousands  of  the  devoutest  spirits  who  live  in 
these  times  feel  that  their  confession  of  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ  and  His  Gospel  would  be  perfectly 
easy — and  supremely  joyous — if  only  it  was  not 
necessary  to  accept  narratives  that  relate  things 
outside  the  course  of  nature  which  He  did  or  were 
done  in  Him.  Here  without  question  has  come 
the  great  reversal  that  affects  religion  more  than 
any  other  one  item  in  the  mental  progress  of  the 
Christian  era.  When  Jesus  was  on  earth  it  would 
have  been  hard  for  typical  men  of  the  age  to  be¬ 
lieve  in  any  religion  which  was  not  evidenced  by 
marvels  manifesting  the  direct  intervention  of  Al¬ 
mighty  God.  Now  we  live  in  an  age  when  very 
many  would  find  themselves  much  more  able  to 
put  confidence  in  the  reality  of  religion  if  there 
were  no  miraculous  factors — at  least,  physically 
miraculous — in  any  way  attached  to  it. 

This  is  a  tremendous  shift  of  viewpoint  which 
certainly  the  men  of  the  time  of  Jesus — either  His 
disciples  or  His  enemies — never  so  much  as 
dreamed  of.  If  He  Himself  foresaw  it,  that  of  it¬ 
self  would  afford  a  strong  ratification  for  the 


MIRACLES  IK  THE  BIBLE 


133 


claim  that  as  a  truly  divine  Teacher  He  brought  to 
earth  a  message  superior  to  the  contingencies  of 
human  change  and  valid  until  the  “  consummation 
of  the  age.”  And  did  He  not  foresee?  Why  else 
was  He  so  impatient  with  “  an  evil  and  adulterous 
generation  ”  that  “  seeketh  after  a  sign  ”  ?  Again 
and  again  He  refused  to  do  miracles  which  people 
around  Him — though  perhaps  insincerely — prom¬ 
ised  to  accept  as  tokens  of  His  Messiahship.  To 
be  sure,  the  Master  could  not  wholly  omit  “  mighty 
works  ”  in  an  epoch  of  life  when  for  any  mes¬ 
senger  of  God  miracles  were  regarded  as  indis¬ 
pensable  credentials.  Doing  them  not  for  show 
but  for  service,  He  did  perform  miracles  of  which 
all  who  were  concerned  might  take  knowledge. 
He  knew  that  there  were  many  who  would  believe 
Him  only  “  for  the  very  works’  sake.”  Those, 
therefore,  He  gave  their  fair  chance — the  “  wit¬ 
ness  ”  which  their  stage  of  spiritual  perception  re¬ 
quired. 

But  even  while  He  accorded  to  certain  disciples 
this  testimony  of  the  “  works,”  He  voiced  a  deeper 
satisfaction  in  the  faith  of  those  who  did  not  need 
such  an  outward  show  of  proof — who  just  from 
the  forthright  spiritual  convincingness  of  the  mes¬ 
sage  were  able  to  believe  on  His  word  alone  that, 
as  He  expressed  it,  “  I  am  in  the  Father  and  the 
Father  in  me.”  Surely  in  His  prospective  hope 
there  was  even  then  the  vision  of  a  more  deeply 
religious  future  when  men  would  not  be  asking 
for  material  marvels  to  assure  them  of  the  presence 
of  God  in  the  world,  but  with  a  keener  awareness 


134 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


of  spiritual  things,  would  see  in  the  very 
character  of  Christ  Himself  the  surer  evi¬ 
dence  of  eternal  Fatherhood  yearning  for  the 
good  of  humanity.  If  indeed  such  was  the 
vision  before  His  eyes  then,  how  happy  He  must 
be  with  this  present  age  of  ours,  when  it  is  very 
certain  that  the  Personality  revealed  by  His  own 
incarnation  has  become  an  argument  for  faith  ten 
thousand  times  more  .powerful  than  all  the  mir¬ 
acles  that  He  ever  wrought. 

If  the  Lord  did  thus  forecast  a  time  when  men 
would  care  little  for  outward  miracles  and  much 
for  the  inward  miracles  of  grace,  He  certainly  did 
not  look  forward  to  it  as  an  age  of  doubt — as  so 
many  dolefully  insist  that  the  present  age  is — but 
as  an  age  of  faith.  There  is,  as  we  have  just 
acknowledged,  something  of  infidelity  in  current 
discounting  of  miracles,  but  on  the  whole  there  is 
in  it  a  good  deal  more  of  sincere  and  trustful 
religious  principle.  For  the  modern  Christian 
stumbles  in  this  matter  over  no  doubt  of  God’s 
power.  He  stumbles  over  no  factitious  dogmatism 
asserting  that  there  are  laws  of  nature  which  na¬ 
ture’s  God  is  incapable  of  transcending.  He  pre¬ 
sumes  on  no  fiction  of  invariable  nature  or  human 
nature.  He  has  indeed  but  a  single  puzzle  to 
disturb  him  in  all  these  premises.  It  is  best 
pictured  in  the  words  of  the  apostle  who  wrote  to 
the  Hebrews:  “Jesus  Christ  is  the  same  yesterday 
and  to-day,  yea  and  forever.”  That  is  what  every 
reverent  thought  of  Jesus  Christ  would  say  of 
Him ;  and  if  of  Him,  how  much  more  of  the  Father 


MIEACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


135 


in  heaven  whom  He  so  constantly  and  lovingly  pro¬ 
claimed  !  Flux  and  mutation  on  earth ;  new  ideas 
and  new  ways  constantly  developing  among  man¬ 
kind;  but  with  God  as  supreme  governor  of  an 
ordered  universe,  with  Jesus  as  supreme  revealer 
of  the  divine  character,  surely  no  novelty  or 
amendment  or  revised  policy. 

Here  then  is  where  the  great  hazard  comes  in 
the  path  of  a  simple  faith  approaching  the  mir¬ 
acles:  There  are  no  miracles  now;  why  were  there 
miracles  in  Bible  times?  Has  God  changed?  Or 
is  His  arm  shortened  so  that  in  our  day  He  cannot 
do  what  once  He  did?  If  miraculous  demonstra-> 
tions  of  His  power  were  once  a  part  of  the  dis¬ 
cipline  of  the  law  and  of  the  preaching  of  the 
Gospel,  why  is  there  no  such  evidence  in  our  day  ? 
A  miracle  is  not  simply  an  unexplained  wonder; 
wonders  in  nature  and  science  are  innumerable 
and  few  of  them  explained.  A  miracle  is  a  won¬ 
der  which  does  not  recur.  And  the  whole  hard¬ 
ship  about  believing  it  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  does 
not  happen  again. 

For  this  perplexity  there  is  but  one  possible 
manner  of  solution  within  the  range  of  a  rational 
faith.  Of  course  God  cannot  change,  nor  is  Jesus 
different  to-day  from  what  He  was  yesterday. 
But  the  world  changes,  and  the  Immutable  and 
Infinite  One  is  neither  so  poor  in  resource  nor  so 
vagrant  in  adaptability  that  He  can  fit  no  new 
means  to  the  training  of  an  advancing  race.  A 
glimpse  of  progressive  educational  method  in  the 
Bible,  by  which  simpler  ideas  were  commended  to 


136 


MIEACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


the  simpler  people  of  a  simpler  time,  and  a  higher 
range  of  thinking  and  fact  opened  to  the  under¬ 
standing  of  a  more  developed  age,  has  already- 
interested  us.  And  it  may  very  well  have  been 
in  the  same  divine  curriculum  simply  another 
aspect  which  proved  God’s  reality  in  earlier  days 
by  supernatural  acts  in  the  physical  creation,  but  in 
later  times  has  preferred  to  rely  on  the  super¬ 
natural  spiritual  experiences  of  men  whom  Christ 
has  saved  from  sin. 

Analogies  that  may  be  drawn  from  the  pedagogy 
which  instructs  our  children  in  modern  schools  lie 
parallel  to  such  a  thought.  What  is  the  teach¬ 
ing  method  of  the  kindergarten?  Blocks,  balls, 
games,  sand-boxes,  crayons— everything  concrete 
for  object  lessons.  What  the  method  of  the  uni¬ 
versity  professor?  Lectures,  assignments  of 
themes,  discussions,  references  to  the  written  au¬ 
thorities — everything  in  the  abstract  for  reason  to 
take  hold  of  and  for  reflection  to  elaborate.  Allow 
that  God  kept  a  kindergarten  equipped  with  object 
lessons  in  the  elder  time,  and  in  this  day  is  getting 
His  pupils  on  toward  the  university  stage — is  there 
not  sufficient  suggestion  there  of  reasons  why 
there  should  once  have  been  objective  miracles 
which  this  generation  no  longer  sees?  God  has 
simply  substituted  for  His  former  appeal  to  the 
eyes  of  men  a  new  and  higher  appeal  to  the  con¬ 
sciousness  of  the  human  soul.  And  if  we  have  in¬ 
terpreted  Jesus  rightly,  all  this  is  a  graduation  into 
higher  things  for  which  He  was  exceedingly  eager 
when  He  was  in  the  world. 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


137 


It  is  also  to  be  mentioned  that  extraordinary 
conditions  always  require  exceptional  measures. 
Furthermore,  unique  conjunctions  of  powers  and 
forces  must  produce  unprecedented  results.  This 
observation  applies  to  God’s  moral  universe  to-day 
exactly  the  same  as  ever.  In  this  sense  the  age  of 
miracles  is  not  past  and  can  never  pass  while  the 
universe  endures.  If  God  had  some  purpose  to 
accomplish  to-day  which  natural  means  would  not 
suffice  to  carry  through,  He  would  assuredly  not 
let  the  purpose  fail  for  lack  of  miraculous  inter¬ 
position.  Indeed,  the  story  of  mankind  abounds, 
as  much  outside  the  Bible  as  inside  it,  with  in¬ 
stances  of  those  “  lucky  chances  ”  or  “  providential 
developments  ”  which  have  again  and  again  given 
victory  to  righteous  causes  against  apparently 
hopeless  odds.  As  acts  of  immediate  divine  control 
over  the  otherwise  uncertain  contingencies  of  life, 
such  events  have  to  the  senses  of  faith  all  the 
characteristics  of  miracle,  except  the  deflection  of 
nature’s  accustomed  cause  and  effect.  They  are 
distinctly  supernatural  interventions.  And  the 
keener  the  crisis  between  good  and  bad,  the  less 
strange  is  the  intervention.  The  path  made  for 
Israel  across  the  Red  Sea  would  have  been  incredi¬ 
ble  in  any  ordinary  case ;  on  the  day  when  the  fate 
of  a  nation  destined  for  the  service  of  God  hangs 
in  the  balance,  anything  which  saves  a  people  is 
credible. 

But,  as  of  course  all  Christians  know,  the  pin¬ 
nacle  heights  of  miracle  in  the  Bible  are  reached  in 
the  life  of  Jesus  Christ,  Himself  as  God  manifest 


138 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


in  the  flesh  the  Miracle  of  the  ages.  Here  once  it 
may  have  been  the  miracles  that  proved  the  Man, 
but  to-day  it  is  the  Man  who  proves  the  miracles. 
Considering  how  different  He  is  from  other  men, 
as  the  conviction  of  accumulating  centuries  more 
and  more  attests — as  the  twentieth  century  better 
than  all  its  predecessors  appreciates — we  can  hold 
it  nothing  unbelievable  that  His  earthly  life  began, 
proceeded  and  ended  with  circumstances  such  as 
have  attached  to  no  other  life  known  to  humanity. 

A  Person  elevated  in  quality  of  character  and  in 
dynamic  of  influence  so  far  above  the  best  attain¬ 
ments  of  the  race  elsewhere,  indexes  the  presence 
of  vitalities  and  potencies  more  transcendently 
divine  than  ever  centered  in  any  other  single  life  in 
this  world.  How  reasonable  then  are  the  memoirs 
of  His  career,  which  show  forth  those  unmatched 
forces  in  unmatched  victory  over  enmity  and  hate, 
in  unmatched  ministration  to  evil,  misery  and  sor¬ 
row — which  reflect  the  shine  of  heavenly  lights 
along  all  the  path  by  which  the  Master  walked  His 
way  through  the  midst  of  men — which  reveal  Him 
dispensing  the  gracious  mercies  of  God  the  Father 
to  the  poorest  and  most  hopeless  of  all  that  He 
met.  That  radiant  story  no  man  could  wish  to 
replace  with  a  picture  less  beautiful.  Is  it  possible 
that  any  man  could  be  happier  for  replacing  it  with 
a  record  poorer  in  beneficent  power? 

The  one  supremely  appropriate  miracle  in  all 
this  gracious  life,  persuasively  crowning  all  else 
that  is  told  us  concerning  Jesus  Christ,  is  His 
resurrection.  That  mighty  event  is  commended  to 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


139 


the  belief  of  the  world  not  only  by  the  historical 
circumstances  surrounding  it — by  the  admitted 
truth  that  the  Lord’s  rising  from  the  dead  explains, 
and  nothing  else  does  explain,  the  astonishing  re¬ 
turn  of  faith  and  hope  to  the  disciples  whom  His 
crucifixion  plunged  into  despair.  It  is  also  and 
even  more  profoundly  made  real  to  the  spiritually 
sensitive  soul  by  a  consciousness  of  the  fitting 
culmination  to  which  it  brought  the  earthly  stay  of 
the  incarnate  “  Word  of  God.”  The  power  of  that 
life  was  a  power  which  in  its  eternal  preeminence 
of  strength  and  beauty  was  justly  destined  to  con¬ 
quer  the  grave;  by  moral  instinct  the  believer  feels 
what  the  great  preacher  of  Pentecost  proclaimed  to 
the  Jerusalem  multitude:  “  It  was  not  possible  that 
he  should  be  holden  of  death.”  More  still,  the 
rising  of  Jesus  offers  a  pledge  of  immortality  to 
the  human  hunger  for  immortality  such  as  emerges 
nowhere  else  to  satisfy  the  anxious  heart  of  man. 
In  all  these  ways  the  crown  of  the  miracles  relates 
itself  to  the  spiritual  experience  of  the  race  and 
obtains  a  verification  which,  though  it  counts  for 
nothing  in  demonstrative  logic,  counts  for  every¬ 
thing  in  the  trust  of  mankind. 

If  it  were  possible  to  make  the  same  kind  of 
affirmation  about  the  miracle  which  accomplished 
the  incarnation  of  the  Divine  Word  one  of  the 
most  entangled  problems  of  current  religion  would 
be  greatly  simplified.  Was  Christ  miraculously 
born  of  a  virgin?  The  narrative  which  tells  us  so 
is  quite  as  plain  and  explicit  as  the  narrative  which 
reports  the  empty  tomb  and  the  reappearance  of 


140 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


the  crucified  Master  among  His  followers.  And 
there  would  be  no  more  doubt  of  the  former  than 
of  the  latter  in  reverent  minds  if  the  miraculous 
conception  stood  now  in  any  such  relation  to 
Christian  experience  as  the  resurrection  does. 
Until  a  recent  day  in  the  history  of  the  Church  the 
virgin  birth  of  Christ  has  expressed  a  concrete 
value  to  both  individual  faith  and  corporate  the¬ 
ology.  It  was  the  sign  and  seal  of  the  “  fullness 
of  the  Godhead  ”  dwelling  bodily  in  Jesus  that  He 
should  have  been  born  without  other  father  than 
His  Father  in  heaven.  And  that  same  sense  of  a 
miracle  birth  as  necessary  for  the  incarnate  God 
would  have  still  been  persisting  in  full  power 
within  the  evangelical  Church  if  there  had  not  come 
over  the  world,  with  the  dawn  of  an  intensely 
scientific  age,  that  universal  change  in  point  of 
view  which  has  been  already  alluded  to. 

This  change  replaced  with  a  very  different  basic 
thought  the  old  assumption  that  God  can  be  seen 
and  known  to  work  only  in  some  totally  unprec¬ 
edented  act  which  cannot  be  referred  to  natural 
law.  The  new  opinion  that  God  is  just  as  divinely 
present  in  any  of  the  common  operations  of  nature 
as  He  could  be  in  the  most  remarkable  special  mir¬ 
acle,  is  beyond  all  question  an  immense  gain  for 
faith — the  extension  of  religious  sacredness  over 
a  measureless  area  of  routine  circumstance  and 
ordinary  life.  But  it  has  had  in  this  respect  an 
unforeseen  and,  to  a  degree,  disturbing  conse¬ 
quence.  It  has  occurred  to  certain  men  of  faith — 
not  of  unfaith — to  ask  why  it  should  be  supposed 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


141 


to  be  necessary  to  work  a  miracle  in  order  to  house 
the  Eternal  Reality  within  the  tabernacle  of  a  hu¬ 
man  body?  A  spiritual  miracle — that  it  was,  un¬ 
deniably.  But  why  a  physical  miracle? 

A  generation  that  believes  in  God  as  the  worker 
of  every  work,  from  the  upthrust  of  a  grass-blade 
to  the  unfolding  of  immortal  personality,  has  no 
philosophical  answer  for  that  question.  It  might 
be  said  that  men  could  not  believe  in  a  divine  in¬ 
carnation  without  a  superhuman  birth,  but  that 
assertion  falls  to  the  ground  at  once  in  face  of  the 
fact  that  many  men  do  so  believe.  They  count  on 
every  human  conception  and  every  human  birth  as 
the  work  of  God,  and  they  are  unprepared  to  say 
that  He  who  by  this  means  supplies  human  bodies 
with  human  souls  would  be  impotent  by  the  like 
means  to  supply  one  human  body  with  a  Divine 
Soul. 

The  upreach  of  men’s  hearts  for  a  Saviour  with 
the  power  of  God  in  his  hands  and  the  love  of 
God  in  his  breast,  which  under  other  circumstances 
would  clinch  the  doctrine  of  the  virgin  birth  in 
the  unbreakable  grip  of  spiritual  necessity,  is  in 
these  conditions  not  so  imperative.  And  many 
doubts  wander  through  the  Church,  asking  why  it 
is  that  Jesus  staked  no  divine  claims  on  His  mirac¬ 
ulous  coming  into  the  world;  why  His  mother; 
and  His  brethren  were  apparently  so  indifferent  to 
His  supernatural  origin;  why  the  apostles  never 
incorporated  the  virgin  birth  into  their  evangel; 
why  especially  John,  who  so  powerfully  teaches 
the  eternal  preexistence  of  Mary’s  Son,  sets  no 


142 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


store  on  the  proof  of  a  physical  origin  different 
from  that  of  other  men? 

All  these  questions,  painful  as  they  are  to  the 
sensibilities  of  old-time  disciples,  must  be  faced, 
dealt  with,  responded  to;  it  would  be  a  fatal  con¬ 
fession  of  intellectual  cowardice  for  the  Church 
anywhere  to  forbid  the  discussion  of  the  problem 
or  anathematize  those  who  raise  the  question. 
The  Church  must  always  be  for  opening  every 
question  wide;  it  is  only  so  that  all  the  truth  can 
come  out.  And  in  this  case  all  occasion  for  panic 
or  for  dread  of  consequences  to  ensue  disappears 
in  the  presence  of  one  superlative  thought-mark 
of  this  present  time — the  constantly  increasing 
modern  appreciation  of  Jesus — His  character,  His 
words,  His  work. 

Whether  men  do  or  do  not  esteem  Him  to  have 
been  brought  into  the  world  by  a  miracle,  they  do 
esteem  Him  the  superlative  Teacher  of  mankind 
in  the  truths  of  the  spiritual  life — the  one  supreme 
Mentor  of  the  consciences  of  men.  Such  is  the 
consensus  which  now  approximates  unanimity 
throughout  the  thoughtful  world.  And  men  do 
not  rate  Him  simply  as  a  man  either;  without  the 
refinements  of  theological  definition  which  the 
creeds  attempt,  the  world  calls  Him  its  one  actual 
superman  and  at  the  least  a  neighbour  to  the 
divine. 

Even  those  who  doubt  the  virgin  birth  are  not 
thinking  to  dishonour  Jesus.  The  unclean  slur 
about  an  illegitimate  parentage  has  been,  so  far  as 
modern  discussion  goes,  no  suggestion  of  these 


MIRACLES  IK  THE  BIBLE 


143 


doubters;  it  was  a  boomerang  foolishly  thrown  by 
certain  orthodox  defenders  of  Christ  and  the 
Bible.  The  other  parties  to  the  question  have 
constantly  said  that  if  the  birth  story  of  Jesus  as 
told  in  Luke  is  not  literal  fact,  it  is  sacred  legend 
developing  from  a  great  loyalty  to  Him  which 
thus  sought  to  account  for  the  vast  contrasts 
visible  between  Jesus  and  the  rest  of  hu¬ 
manity.  And  in  the  end  it  may  decisively 
serve  to  vindicate  the  literalness  of  the  na¬ 
tivity  narrative  that  its  critics  have  elected  to 
stand  on  just  this  alternative  to  its  historicity. 
We  have  already  observed  that  a  miracle  birth  is 
hard  to  believe  in  our  environment  because  natural 
birth  itself  seems  to  us  a  divine  wonder.  There 
was  in  the  orient  in  ancient  times  one  nation  only 
which  felt  just  that  way — the  Hebrew  nation, 
which  always  said:  “  Lo,  children  are  a  heritage  of 
Jehovah.,,  The  Jewish  people,  therefore,  never 
had  the  mental  background  that  would  suggest  a 
poetic  imagination  of  miraculous  paternity  as  a 
tribute  of  honour  to  any  man.  The  Greeks  made 
myths  on  that  supposition;  there  is  not  a  sign  of 
any  such  strain  in  Hebrew  thought.  Yet  the 
stories  of  Christ’s  birth  are  Hebrew — purely  He¬ 
brew.  On  the  strictest  critical  grounds  it  is  easier 
to  accept  their  actuality  than  to  presume  them 
fanciful.  Hebrews  would  have  been  little  more 
likely  to  invent  such  a  story  than  Americans. 

Yet  all  this  is  but  a  secondary  matter  where  the 
consciousness  of  Christians  has  responded  to  the 
supreme  and  sublime  New  Testament  revelation  of 


144 


MIRACLES  IN  THE  BIBLE 


Jesus  of  Nazareth  as  the  only  begotten  Son  of 
God,  who  “  being  found  in  fashion  as  a  man 
humbled  himself,  becoming  obedient  unto  death, 
yea,  the  death  of  the  cross — wherefore  God  highly 
exalted  him  and  gave  unto  him  the  name  which  is 
above  every  name.”  It  is  He,  Jesus  Christ,  who 
is  the  all  comprehending  Miracle  of  the  Bible,  and 
so  long  as  the  ascending  star  of  His  incarnate  di¬ 
vinity  is  rising  higher  on  the  firmament  of  human 
idealism — as  it  surely  is  to-day — there  need  be 
none  to  fear  in  His  case  “  the  elimination  of  the 
supernatural  element  from  the  Scriptures.”  Per¬ 
chance  there  might  here  or  there  be  some  one  rash 
enough  to  think  he  could  accomplish  that  feat. 
But  what  can  he  do  while  of  the  whole  book  Jesus 
Himself  remains  the  “  chief  corner-stone  ”  ? 


XIII 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


THE  opinions  touching  the  Bible  which 
have  been  set  down  in  the  foregoing 
studies  have  consulted  no  authority  ex¬ 
cept  the  Scriptures  themselves.  There  is,  however, 
a  deep  satisfaction  in  finding,  when  the  subject 
has  been  so  far  traversed,  that  the  conclusions  ar¬ 
rived  at  are  in  large  accord  with  what  was  said 
about  the  Scriptures  by  the  Puritan  theologians 
who  gathered  at  Westminster  in  1645  to  erect  a 
Reformation  structure  of  doctrine  and  polity  for 
the  Protestantism  of  England. 

The  stalwart  Confession  of  Faith  which  they 
elaborated  is  sufficient  certificate  for  the  intellec¬ 
tual  power  of  the  members  of  that  famous  as¬ 
sembly,  and  a  present-day  pilgrim  may  fairly  feel 
that  he  has  not  wandered  into  any  domain  of  folly 
when  he  reaches  a  resting-place  within  sight  of 
their  celebrated  heights.  But  more  important  is 
the  reassurance  which  must  be  afforded  to  many 
by  discovering  how  remote  from  “  modernism,” 
judged  by  this  comparison,  are  some  of  the  views 
of  Scripture  which  are  often  nowadays  branded 
as  dangerous.  The  Westminster  Confession  in  de¬ 
fining  Bible  inspiration  is  decisively  broader  in  out- 

*45 


146  LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


look  and  far  less  mechanical  in  its  conception  of 
Scripture  authority  than  many  latter-day  inter¬ 
pretations  professing  to  be  based  upon  it.  Timidi¬ 
ties  which  the  Westminster  divines  did  not  feel 
have  induced  more  recent  defenders  of  the  faith 
to  block  up  with  too  hasty  dogmatisms  windows 
which  they  left  open  for  light  and  air. 

For  example,  the  inerrancy  of  the  Scriptures  as 
to  facts  of  nature  and  records  of  history  has  come 
to  be  with  a  host  of  contemporary  Christians  the 
supreme  test  of  authenticity  for  the  book.  But 
the  eloquent  and  expansive  chapter  which  the 
Westminster  assembly  produced  on  the  topic  of  the 
Bible  contains  not  the  barest  suggestion  of  any 
such  idea.  Probably  the  authors  of  the  confession 
would  not  have  agreed  among  themselves  whether 
in  this  sense  the  Bible  is  inerrant.  But  they  did 
agree  in  regarding  it  as  needless  to  establish  such 
a  character  for  the  book  in  order  to  command  for 
it  the  honour  and  reverence  and  obedience  to  which 
it  is  entitled  by  the  divine  supremacy  which  for 
far  more  significant  reasons  they  attributed  to  it. 

The  qualities  which  these  men  did  think  req¬ 
uisite  in  the  Bible  were  such  and  such  only  as  had 
evidently  to  do  with  the  object  for  which  God 
gave  it  to  humanity.  And  they  had  no  difficulty 
in  defining  to  their  own  satisfaction  what  that 
object  was.  It  is  surprising  but  gratifying  to  find 
that  these  learned  and  philosophic  gentlemen, 
whose  flow  of  language  was  singularly  copious  on 
other  aspects  of  their  subject,  were  terse,  simple 
and  sententious  when  they  undertook  to  say  what 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  147 


God  intended  the  Scriptures  for.  Two  lines  suf¬ 
fice.  When  the  books  of  the  Old  and  New  Testa¬ 
ments  had  been  rehearsed  in  order,  they  added: 

“  All  which  were  given  by  inspiration  of  God  to 
be  the  rule  of  faith  and  lif e.^^ 

Faith  and  life!  To  these  ends,  vital  for  every 
immortal  spirit  on  whom  the  image  of  God  confers 
potential  partnership  in  things  divine,  the  teachers 
and  preachers  of  the  Gospel  in  assembly  at  West¬ 
minster  beheld  the  Holy  Bible  dedicated  by  “  the 
determinate  counsel  and  foreknowledge  of  God.” 
Seeing  the  book  in  this  exalted  vision,  they  were 
delivered  from  the  pettishness  of  matching  jots 
and  tittles  between  this  verse  here  and  another 
verse  there,  and  were  enabled  to  dwell  with  a  broad 
admiration,  critical  in  the  highest  and  best  sense, 
on  the  lofty  merits  that  have  invested  the  Bible 
with  a  universal  reputation  of  divinity.  In  all  the 
literature  of  classic  English  there  is  no  finer  para¬ 
graph  of  prose  than  that  in  which  the  Westminster 
creed-makers  undertook  to  enumerate  the  fine  gold 
and  jewels  of  God’s  wealth  displayed  in  His  one 
royal  book: 

“  The  heavenliness  of  the  matter,  the  efficacy  of 
the  doctrine,  the  majesty  of  the  style,  the  consent 
of  all  the  parts,  the  scope  of  the  whole  (which  is  to 
give  all  glory  to  God),  the  full  discovery  it  makes  of 
the  only  way  of  man’s  salvation,  the  many  other  in¬ 
comparable  excellencies,  and  the  entire  perfection 
thereof,  are  arguments  whereby  it  doth  abundantly- 
evidence  itself  to  be  the  word  of  God.” 


148  LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


“  Doth  abundantly  evidence  itself  ” — of  a  truth 
indeed!  What  more  need  be  said  to  make  mani¬ 
fest  the  Bible’s  supreme  value  for  “  faith  and 
life  ”  ?  Would  the  Westminster  clergy  have  added 
aught  to  their  argument  in  behalf  of  its  “  incom¬ 
parable  excellencies  ”  if  this  recital  of  theirs  had 
been  climaxed  with  the  claim  that  the  book  con¬ 
tains  a  mathematically  exact  record  of  the  great 
ages  reached  by  antediluvian  patriarchs?  They 
could  no  doubt  have  made  that  statement  unqual¬ 
ifiedly;  in  their  time  any  Christian  would  have 
quoted  the  figures  of  Genesis  for  the  longevity  of 
Adam,  Methuselah  and  Noah  without  a  quaver  of 
question.  As  their  own  fourth  chapter  shows, 
these  great  ecclesiastics  took  the  creation  of  world, 
sun,  moon  and  man  to  have  been  accomplished  in 
the  six  days  of  a  single  mundane  week.  It  was  then 
no  inroad  of  agnosticism  which  prompted  them  to 
omit  inerrancy  from  their  tribute  to  the  perfection 
of  Holy  Scripture.  They  omitted  it  rather  because 
it  lay  so  far  below  the  plane  of  their  nobler  out¬ 
look  on  the  grandeur  of  God’s  revelation.  They 
omitted  it  for  the  same  reason  that  men  desert  low 
and  shifty  seasands  for  the  surety  and  solidity  of 
the  lifting  rock;  they  knew  a  higher  and  safer 
place  to  stand. 

Had  therefore  these  men  lived  until  humanity 
learned  that  the  earth  was  not  created  before  the 
sun,  moon  and  stars  which  enlighten  it;  that  the 
making  of  the  universe  was  the  process  of  an  aeon 
rather  than  of  a  week ;  that  the  antiquity  of  man¬ 
kind  cannot  be  calculated  by  adding  up  the  “  gene- 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  149 


rations  ”  of  Genesis,  they  would  have  been  in  no 
wise  shaken  in  their  esteem  of  the  Bible,  for  they 
would  have  perceived  that  in  these  extensions  of 
scientific  knowledge  nothing  had  developed  to  alter 
in  the  slightest  the  worth  of  the  book  as  “  the  rule 
of  faith  and  life.” 

What  had  changed  was  the  understanding  of 
men  concerning  the  material  surroundings  in 
which  they  dwelt,  of  which  things  the  Creator  had 
never  engaged  to  make  greater  or  more  hasty  reve¬ 
lation  than  their  own  diligence  of  inquiry  might 
lead  them  to.  Revelation  in  its  Biblical  quality, 
pertaining  to  the  spiritual  duties  and  spiritual 
hopes  of  the  sons  of  God,  stood  high  above  all 
scientific  fluctuations  and  not  within  touch  of  the 
tides  of  Ptolemaic  or  Copernican  opinion,  whether 
they  ebbed  or  flowed.  It  affected  neither  saving 
grace  nor  saved  life  for  a  man  to  suppose  that  the 
sun  revolved  about  the  earth  or  to  know  that  the 
earth  revolves  around  the  sun. 

In  the  light  of  this  excellent  common  sense — 
and  just  as  excellent  religious  apprehension — the 
members  of  the  assembly  at  Westminster  stood 
clear  of  all  fears  of  conflict  between  science  and 
religion.  It  was  only  a  later  and  more  timorous 
school  of  Protestants  who,  thinking  the  Bible  to 
need  more  defense  than  its  Author  had  thrown 
around  it,  invented  the  superfluous  requirement 
that  a  book  inspired  for  “  faith  and  life  ”  must  be 
also  miraculously  authoritative  on  causes,  circum¬ 
stances  and  consequences  in  nature.  Such  teach¬ 
ers  had  the  sad  reward  of  their  undue  industry 


150  LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


when  their  theory — not  anything  that  God  had  said 
in  the  Bible — compelled  them  in  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century  to  tell  the  youth  of  that  time 
that  they  must  reject  the  evidences  of  the  then 
rising  science  of  geology  in  respect  to  the  age  of 
the  earth,  or  else  cease  to  be  Christian  believers. 
Only  God  knows  how  many  souls  that  folly  ruined. 
And  only  He  can  tell  what  damage  was  done  to 
the  spirituality  of  America  when  in  the  end  of  the 
century  church  leaders  well-nigh  abandoned  the 
evangelistic  ministry  of  the  Gospel  to  battle  for 
the  defense  of  a  dogma  respecting  “  original  auto¬ 
graphs  ”  which  was  equally  worthless  to  nurture 
faith  upon  or  guide  life  by. 

We  have  not  yet,  however,  indicated  the  most 
admirable  height  to  which  the  Westminster  as¬ 
sembly  attained  in  its  view  of  Holy  Scripture.  It 
was  on  its  way  to  that  height  when  it  recognized 
the  fact,  which  these  studies  have  already  sought 
to  make  clear,  that  the  truth  of  Scripture  is  heard 
not  in  the  single  voice  of  any  isolated  passage  but 
in  the  harmony  and  balance  secured  by  the  com¬ 
position  of  many  voices  into  one  revelation.  The 
writers  of  the  Confession  took  special  pains  to 
stress  this.  Their  paragraph  on  this  point  is  lucid 
and  unmistakable: 

“  The  infallible  rule  of  interpretation  of  Scripture 
is  the  Scripture  itself ;  and  therefore,  when  there  is 
a  question  about  the  full  and  true  sense  of  any  Scrip¬ 
ture  (which  is  not  manifold  but  one),  it  may  be 
searched  and  known  by  other  places  that  speak  more 
clearly.” 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  151 


One  might  wish  to  stop  a  moment  to  study  the 
authors’  use  of  the  word  “  infallible  ”  in  this  con¬ 
nection,  where  it  occurs  apart  from  that  technical 
association  which  customarily  attaches  it  to  the 
thought  of  inspiration.  Here  it  is  plain  that  the 
makers  of  the  Confession  do  not  intend  to  say 
that  the  comparison  of  Scripture  with  Scripture 
always  results  in  a  conclusion  free  from  the  liabili¬ 
ties  of  human  misunderstanding.  But  they  do 
mean  to  say  that  when  any  Scriptural  matter  is 
obscure  and  perplexing,  this  is  the  right  road  by 
which  to  proceed  to  its  clearing  up.  Not  every 
inquirer  who  takes  this  path,  indeed,  may  reach 
the  goal  of  the  perfect  truth,  but  infallibly  each 
step  in  this  direction  brings  him  nearer.  It  is  the 
always  unmistaken  method.  And  that  justifies  the 
adjective  “  infallible.” 

This,  however,  is  but  incidental.  The  outstand¬ 
ing  impression  of  the  paragraph  is  its  clear  appre¬ 
ciation  that  the  Bible  is  not  to  be  judged  or  to  be 
used  piecemeal.  The  Bible  derives  its  authority 
from,  and  accomplishes  its  service  to  mankind 
through,  the  “  consent  of  all  the  parts  ”  into  which 
its  elements  have  been  worked  by  the  divine  Hand. 
The  volume  entire  is  the  inspired  unit,  authenti¬ 
cated  with  the  divine  signature  underwriting  a 
completed  divine  design. 

The  culminating  peak  of  the  chapter  follows — 
its  last  paragraph : 

“  The  Supreme  Judge,  by  which  all  controversies 
of  religion  are  to  be  determined,  and  all  decrees  of 


152  LIBEBALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


councils,  opinions  of  ancient  writers,  doctrines  of 
men  and  private  spirits,  are  to  be  examined,  and  in 
whose  sentence  we  can  rest,  can  be  no  other  but 
the  Holy  Spirit  speaking  in  the  S capture.” 

Of  these  potent  words  the  significance  is  still 
more  manifest  when — adapting  to  their  own  utter¬ 
ances  the  procedure  which  these  famous  theolo¬ 
gians  recommend  for  the  Bible — we  bring  into 
comparison  the  concluding  sentence  of  their  .fifth 
paragraph : 

“  Our  full  persuasion  and  assurance  of  the  in¬ 
fallible  truth  and  divine  authority  [of  the  word  of 
God]  is  from  the  inward  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit 
bearing  witness  by  and  with  the  word  in  our  hearts.” 

Here  we  find  these  early  Puritan  thinkers  boldly 
adventuring  what  most  of  their  successors  since 
have  been  too  timid  to  risk — staking  the  potency 
of  inspired  Scripture  on  the  response  of  Christian 
experience.  Against  the  hazard  of  this  many  a 
nervous  champion  of  religion  has  protested  pas¬ 
sionately.  “  What  a  catastrophe  would  befall  the 
world,”  such  a  one  will  cry,  “  if  the  experience  of 
men  should  turn  against  the  Bible — if  men  should 
suddenly  say  the  book  does  not  impress  them  as 
having  anything  heavenly  about  it  and  cast  it  out 
as  worthless!”  Popular  opinion  on  any  subject 
is  fickle,  we  are  reminded,  and  who  knows  what 
day  the  Bible  might  be  found  stripped  bare  of  the 
favour  with  which  it  is  now  a  common  fashion  to 
speak  of  it?  And  indeed,  if  there  were  nothing  to 
take  account  of  but  a  handful  of  pages  of  black- 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  153 


and-white  reading  matter  on  the  one  hand  and  a 
protean  crowd  psychology  on  the  other,  it  would 
be  a  precarious  business  to  leave  the  treasures  of 
divine  revelation  to  be  certified  by  the  appreciation 
of  an  inconstant  world.  But  the  men  who  wrote 
this  now  venerable  creed  were  not  limited  in  their 
calculations  to  such  fluctuating  factors.  They  put 
faith  in  certain  vast  fixities. 

They  believed  in  God,  who  made  the  book;  in 
the  human  soul,  for  which  the  book  was  made ;  in 
the  Holy  Spirit,  to  whose  directing  use  the  book 
was  committed;  in  Jesus  Christ,  the  all-command¬ 
ing  Figure  on  whom  the  illumination  of  the  book 
is  focused.  Here  are  changeless  quantities  which 
the  drift  of  time  cannot  remove  nor  currents  and 
counter  currents  of  popular  whimsy  wash  away. 
A  century  since,  a  century  hence  and  to-day  the 
need  of  human  nature  for  forgiveness  and  the  urge 
of  human  conscience  toward  a  life  more  fit  in 
righteousness  remain  as  through  immemorial  time. 
And  God,  who  “  himself  knows  what  is  in  man,” 
has  presciently  calculated  the  Holy  Scripture  to 
meet  that  continuing  need,  that  abiding  urge. 

Moreover,  the  Bible  does  not  do  its  work  alone ; 
by  the  Spirit  who  lives  in  and  labours  through  its 
messages  it  is  applied  not  in  general  to  the  mass 
of  mankind  but  in  selective  measure,  as  individual 
susceptibility  allows  or  individual  guidance  may 
require,  to  one  man  and  another  according  to  the 
appropriate  portion  of  each.  This  is  bold  faith 
indeed,  but  no  evangelical  orthodoxy  ever  said  less. 
How,  indeed,  could  a  spiritually  minded  teacher 


154  LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


affirm  anything  effective  of  Bible  inspiration  if 
he  hesitated  to  affirm  that  the  Spirit  who  imparted 
inspiring  wisdom  to  the  writers  of  it  imparts  en¬ 
lightened  understanding  to  the  readers  of  it?  Cer¬ 
tainly  there  was  no  such  hesitation  in  the  West¬ 
minster  assembly. 

Why  then  should  any  one  who  accepts  at  all  the 
postulates  of  revelation  think  it  a  tottering  foun¬ 
dation  to  put  beneath  the  permanent  influence  of 
Scripture  when  it  is  said  to  rest  on  the  obedient 
belief  it  secures  from  successive  generations  of 
humanity?  Has  that  belief  or  that  obedience  ever 
failed  in  any  age  since  the  Bible  came  to  be?  It 
has  not.  Nor  will  it  until  there  comes  a  genera¬ 
tion  of  men  who  have  none  of  the  spiritual  long¬ 
ings  which  the  God  of  the  Bible  put  in  them  and 
which  He  gave  them  the  Bible  to  satisfy;  who 
have  none  of  the  sins  from  which  Jesus  Christ 
came  to  redeem  them;  who  have  totally  shut  out 
the  infinite  Spirit  from  access  to  their  intelligence, 
their  emotion  and  their  will.  Till  then  the  certif¬ 
icate  going  before  every  other  credential  of  Scrip¬ 
ture  will  be  the  testimony  which  Coleridge  voiced 
for  millions: 

“  In  the  Bible  there  is  more  that  finds  me  than  I 
have  experienced  in  all  other  books  put  together ;  the 
words  of  the  Bible  find  me  at  greater  depths  of  my 
being;  and  whatever  finds  me  brings  with  it  an  ir¬ 
resistible  evidence  of  its  having  proceeded  from  the 
Holy  Spirit.” 

Yes,  “the  Spirit  speaking  in  the  Scripture”  is 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  155 


“  the  supreme  judge  ”  of  the  actuality  of  inspired 
revelation.  And  His  verdicts  are  rendered  not 
through  “  decrees  of  councils,  opinions  of  ancient 
writers,”  or  “  doctrines  of  men,”  but  through  the 
Spirit's  “  inward  work,  bearing  witness  with  and 
by  the  word  in  our  own  hearts.”  In  the  inward 
life  of  private  Christians — their  daily  audience  in 
the  secret  place  with  their  Lord — is  the  decision 
on  the  issues  of  life  which  constitutes  the  answer 
of  the  living  Church  to  every  problem  of  faith. 

The  conjoint  judgments  of  the  brethren  registered 
in  assemblies  and  councils  and  conferences  stand 
in  all  proper  dignity  on  the  records  of  a  fraternal 
Christendom.  But  every  such  corporate  deliver¬ 
ance  must  go  for  naught  unless  it  is  ratified  in  the 
consciousness  of  private  disciples  who  read  the 
Bible  and  pray  over  it  at  their  own  hearthstones. 
The  great  convocations  of  the  Church  may  pro¬ 
claim  what  they  will  to  be  the  truth  of  God,  but 
none  will  believe  it  in  the  end  because  it  is  so  pro¬ 
claimed.  It  will  be  believed,  if  at  all,  because  the 
Spirit  says  it  is  true  when  each  individual  man 
opens  the  Scriptures  and  reverently  asks  for  light. 

Thus  is  fulfilled  what  the  Saviour  spoke  just 
before  He  went  to  His  cross ;  “  When  he,  the 
Spirit  of  truth,  is  come,  he  shall  guide  you  into  all 
the  truth;  for  he  shall  not  speak  of  himself,  but 
what  things  soever  he  shall  hear,  these  shall  he 
speak,  and  he  shall  declare  unto  you  the  things  that 
are  to  come.”  This  final  phrase  has  been  gravely 
misconstrued  by  those  who  have  thought  it  to 
promise  for  the  Church  a  power  to  foresee  and 


156  LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY 


foretell  happenings  buried  in  the  contingencies  of 
the  future.  It,  of  course,  means  not  that  at  all — as 
the  context  shows.  But  it  is  a  very  precious  re¬ 
assurance  that  no  Christian  who  prays  for  it  un¬ 
selfishly  shall  ever  be  left  in  want  of  that  divine 
counsel  which  is  ever  waiting  to  apply  anew  to  the 
problems  of  each  new  age  the  lasting  principles 
made  known  in  the  written  Scriptures.  And  it  is 
not  another  Spirit,  but  the  same  Spirit  of  truth 
who  inspired  the  Bible  who  is  now  with  us  to  in¬ 
terpret  it  freshly  for  every  freshly  given  day  of 
opportunity  and  obligation. 

It  will,  of  course,  be  objected  that  this  way  of 
claiming  the  present  aid  of  the  one  Spirit  of  in¬ 
spiration  amounts  to  asserting  that  additions  to 
the  Bible  or  new  utterances  as  valuable  as  the 
Bible  might  still  be  produced  to-day.  And  so  no 
doubt  there  could  be,  did  God  so  design  it.  But 
the  “  providence  of  the  canon  ”  was  a  providence 
of  specific  intent  accomplished  in  specific  time. 
Being  accomplished  according  to  God’s  plan  for 
creating  a  perpetual  book  of  standard  reference 
on  religion,  the  making  of  Scripture  is  done  and 
ended. 

The  Bible,  in  an  earlier  stage  of  these  studies, 
has  been  compared  to  a  course  of  education  for 
mankind.  No  course  of  education  aims  to  teach 
the  student  all  that  he  can  learn  in  the  world;  it 
only  aims  to  afford  him  a  conspectus  of  truth  with 
which  all  that  he  discovers  of  truth  in  later  life 
shall  be  accordant.  The  graduate  of  any  school 
goes  out  to  learn  other  things  than  his  teachers 


LIBERALISM  WITHIN  ORTHODOXY  157 


told  him.  But  if  he  has  been  well  taught,  he  will 
learn  nothing  contradictory  of  what  they  told  him. 
So  the  Spirit  of  truth  instructs  the  Church  of  to¬ 
day  and  of  all  days  in  many  new  ways  of  think¬ 
ing,  serving  and  giving  glory  to  God.  But  let  no 
man  dread  the  appearance  of  “  another  Gospel.” 
The  new  unfolding  will  but  confirm  the  old  re¬ 
vealing.  There  is  no  contradiction  in  truth — only 
ratification  by  fresh  application.  The  Bible  will 
not  be  supplemented — still  less  superseded.  It 
will  simply  grow  in  glory  as  clearer  apprehensions 
reflect  its  divine  knowledge  along  an  ever  widen¬ 
ing  arc  of  the  interests  of  mankind.  And  ever  it 
will  be  the  abundant  text-book  of  the  Spirit’s 
school  for  souls. 

Evangelical  churches  all  require  of  those  who 
are  set  in  official  responsibility  for  teaching  and 
government  in  religion  some  form  expressing  their 
confessed  acceptance  of  the  Bible.  The  Presby¬ 
terian  formula  is  typical — a  question  propounded 
as  follows:  “  Do  you  believe  the  Scriptures  of  the 
Old  and  New  Testaments  to  be  the  word  of  God, 
the  only  infallible  rule  of  faith  and  practice?” 
Will  any  Christian  refuse  to  say  “  Yes  ”  hap¬ 
pily  and  boldly  whose  soul  has  been  “  found  ”  deep 
down  by  the  great  things  of  the  book  ? 

A  “  rule  of  faith  and  practice  ” — that  indubi¬ 
tably  he  needs  along  the  winding,  briar-hedged 
pathways  by  which  he  is  bound  to  journey  through 
this  perplexing  world ;  a  rule  to  tell  how  to  go  and 
what  to  hope  for  and  Whom  to  trust.  And  the 
“  only  rule  ” — surely  that  also ;  for  there  is  no 


158  LIBEBALISM  WITHIN  OBTHODOXY 


other  to  compare  with  this.  An  experienced 
traveller  would  as  soon  trade  a  compass  for  a 
wooden  stick  as  this  book  for  any  other  guide  that 
men  have  ever  tried  to  follow.  More  than  that, 
“  the  only  infallible  rule  ” — what’s  to  deny  there? 
Did  any  man  ever  miss  light  or  wreck  life  who 
humbly  took  the  Bible  determined  to  follow  it 
wherever  it  directed  him  ?  Has  it  ever  been  to  any 
man  a  cheating  book,  a  wrong-leading  book?  No, 
“  infallible  ”  is  a  strong  word,  but  not  too  strong 
for  this  book  that  has  stood  all  tests  through  all 
the  Christian  centuries  and  is  relied  on  to-day  by 
greater  throngs  than  in  any  prior  day  of  time  who 
have  found  it  sincere,  verifiable,  alight  with  truth. 

And  the  “  word  of  God  ” — to  that  the  living 
Spirit  ever  bears  the  witness  of  power  that  goes 
forth  from  it  to  the  redeemed  in  all  climes  and 
nations. 

With  joy,  out  of  experience  in  which  he  humbly 
trusts  himself  to  have  been  instructed  by  the  Spirit, 
the  present  writer  subscribes  anew  this  time-hon¬ 
oured  formula: 

“  I  believe  the  Scriptures  of  the  Old  and  New 
Testament  to  be  the  word  of  God,  the  only  in¬ 
fallible  rule  of  faith  and  practice.’' 


Appendix 

WESTMINSTER  CONFESSION  OF  FAITH 

Chapter  I — “Of  the  Holy  Scripture” 

I.  Although  the  light  of  nature,  and  the  works  of  creation 
and  providence,  do  so  far  manifest  the  goodness,  wisdom,  and  power 
of  God,  as  to  leave  men  inexcusable;  yet  they  are  not  sufficient  to 
give  that  knowledge  of  God  and  of  His  will,  which  is  necessary  unto 
salvation ;  therefore  it  pleased  the  Lord,  at  sundry  times,  and  in 
divers  manners,  to  reveal  Himself,  and  to  declare  that  His  will  unto 
His  Church ;  and  afterwards,  for  the  better  preserving  and  propagaf- 
ing  of  the  truth,  and  for  the  more  sure  establishment  and  comfort  of 
the  Church  against  the  corruption  of  the  flesh,  and  the  malice  of 
Satan  and  of  the  world,  to  commit  the  same  wholly  unto  writing; 
which  maketh  the  Holy  Scripture  to  be  most  necessary;  those  for¬ 
mer  ways  of  God’s  revealing  His  will  unto  His  people  being  now 
ceased. 

II.  Under  the  name  of  Holy  Scripture,  or  the  Word  of  God 
written,  are  now  contained  all  the  books  of  the  Old  and  New  Testa¬ 
ment,  which  are  these : 

(Here  follow  the  names  of  the  books  of  the  Bible  as  contained 
in  the  King  James  Version.) 

All  which  are  given  by  inspiration  of  God,  to  be  the  rule  of  faith 
and  life. 

III.  The  books  commonly  called  Apocrypha,  not  being  of  divine 
inspiration,  are  no  part  of  the  canon  of  the  Scripture ;  and  there¬ 
fore  are  of  no  authority  in  the  Church  of  God,  nor  to  be  any  other¬ 
wise  approved,  or  made  use  of,  than  other  human  writings. 

IV.  The  authority  of  the  Holy  Scripture,  for  which  it  ought  to 
be  believed  and  obeyed,  dependeth  not  upon  the  testimony  of  any 
man  or  church,  but  wholly  upon  God  (who  is  truth  itself),  the 
author  thereof ;  and  therefore  it  is  to  be  received,  because  it  is  the 
Word  of  God. 

V.  We  may  be  moved  and  induced  by  the  testimony  of  the 
Church  to  an  high  and  reverent  esteem  of  the  Holy  Scripture ;  and 
the  heavenliness  of  the  matter,  the  efficacy  of  the  doctrine,  the 
majesty  of  the  style,  the  consent  of  all  the  parts,  the  scope  of  the 
whole  (which  is  to  give  all  glory  to  God),  the  full,  discovery  it 
makes  of  the  only  way  of  man’s  salvation,  the  many  other  incom¬ 
parable  excellencies,  and  the  entire  perfection  thereof,  are  arguments 
whereby  it  doth  abundantly  evidence  itself  to  be  the  Word  of  God; 
yet,  notwithstanding,  our  full  persuasion  and  assurance  of  the  in- 

159 


160 


APPENDIX 


fallible  truth,  and  divine  authority  thereof,  is  from  the  inward  work 
of  the  Holy  Spirit,  bearing  witness  by  and  with  the  Word  in  our 
hearts. 

VI.  The  whole  counsel  of  God,  concerning  all  things  necessary 
for  His  own  glory,  man’s  salvation,  faith,  and  life,  is  either  expressly 
set  down  in  Scripture,  or  by  good  arid  necessary  consequence  may 
be  deduced  from  Scripture;  unto  which  nothing  at  any  time  is  to  be 
added,  whether  by  new  revelations  of  the  Spirit  or  traditions  of 
men.  Nevertheless  we  acknowledge  the  inward  illumination  of  the 
Spirit  of  God  to  be  necessary  for  the  saving  understanding  of  such 
things  as  are  revealed  in  the  Word;  and  there  are  some  circum¬ 
stances  concerning  the  worship  of  God  and  government  of  the  Church, 
common  to  human  actions  and  societies,  which  are  to  be  ordered  by 
the  light  of  nature  and  Christian  prudence,  according  to  the  gen¬ 
eral  rules  of  the  Word,  which  are  always  to  be  observed. 

VII.  All  things  in  Scripture  are  not  alike  plain  in  themselves,  nor 
alike  clear  unto  all;  yet  those  things  which  are  necessary  to  be 
known,  believed,  and  observed,  for  salvation,  are  so  clearly  pro¬ 
pounded  and  opened  in  some  place  of  Scripture  or  other,  that  not 
only  the  learned,  but  the  unlearned,  in  a  due  use  of  the  ordinary 
means,  may  attain  unto  a  sufficient  understanding  of  them. 

VIII.  The  Old  Testament  in  Hebrew  (which  was  the  native 
language  of  the  people  of  God  of  old),  and  the  New  Testament  in 
Greek  (which  at  the  time  of  the  writing  of  it  was  most  generally 
known  to  the  nations),  being  immediately  inspired  by  God,  and  by 
His  singular  care  and  providence  kept  pure  in  all  ages,  are  therefore 
authentical;  so  as  in  all  controversies  of  religion  the  Church  is 
finally  to  appeal  unto  them.  But  because  these  original  tongues  are 
not  known  to  all  the  people  of  God  who  have  right  unto  and  interest 
in  the  Scriptures,  and  are  commanded,  in  the  fear  of  God,  to  read 
and  search  them,  therefore  they  are  to  be  translated  into  the  vulgar 
language  of  every  nation  unto  which  they  come,  that  the  Word  of 
God  dwelling  plentifully  in  all,  they  may  worship  Him  in  an  ac¬ 
ceptable  manner,  and,  through  patience  and  comfort  of  the  Scrip¬ 
tures,  may  have  hope. 

IX.  The  infallible  rule  of  interpretation  of  Scripture  is  the 
Scripture  itself ;  and  therefore,  when  there  is  a  question  about  the 
true  and  full  sense  of  any  Scripture  (which  is  not  manifold,  but  one), 
it  may  be  searched  and  known  by  other  places  that  speak  more 
clearly. 

X.  The  Supreme  Judge,  by  whom  all  controversies  of  religion 
are  to  be  determined,  and  all  decrees  of  councils,  opinions  of  ancient 
writers,  doctrines  of  men,  and  private  spirits,  are  to  be  examined,  and 
in  whose  sentence  we  are  to  rest,  can  be  no  other  but  the  Holy 
Spirit  speaking  in  the  Scripture. 


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